Fiona Wright

Crossing

Language: english

Translations: german (Grenzübergang)

Crossing

First, the dust cross-pollinates.
Guards in saggy khaki scratch
their noses, spit phlegm
before their stamps rubber
          onto our watermarked papers.
The road is thick. Wads of paper money.
Laundry bags,
and swift exchanges,
the litter of planky rickshaws
         and the speeding limbs of cobble-chested boys.
They drag past crates of cigarettes, munitions
         and pickled pythons, their bulb-like elders
sweep their hands and beam broadly at pink casinos.
Ribby women swagger under gemstones
         and rub their tongues over their teeth:
Perhaps there is no law
but human enterprise, the thick illicit
        and a price for everything.

Fiona Wright

* 18.11.1983, Sydney, Australia
lives in: Sydney, Australia

Fiona Wright, born in 1983, is a Sydney poet, whose poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. Her work was included in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2009, 2010 (Black Ink) and The Red Room Company's Toilet Doors Project (2004). She was runner-up in the 2008 John Marsden National Young Writers Award. In 2007, she was awarded an Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre, developing a sequence of poems about Australians in Sri Lanka.

With Knuckled, her first collection of poems (2011), she joins a generation of exceptionally talented young Australian women poets. Her poems combine a rich poetic sensibility with a mature understanding of form and structure. The distinguishing characteristic of Fiona Wright's poetry is a social sense, of families and people in a particular place and time. Her details embody attitudes, prejudices, anxieties, identifications

In 2012 she has won the Dame Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize for a best first book for Knuckled. In its reasoning the jury stated: This is forceful poetry that lives up to its title, showing violence, damage, anxiety: seismic tremors of personal, cultural and global dimensions. [...] At once both physically ‘real’ and as well highly metaphorical Wright’s poems confront, tease and detain us with their complex insights and serious intelligence.

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