Grim, funny and unremitting, Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot is a book attuned to dark times

“Girly, there’s something rotten in your keep cup,” Evelyn Araluen writes in Girl Work!, a poem in her new collection, The Rot.

We are trailing after a young female Hamlet figure, a contemporary up-and-coming princess or “girlboss” off to work in some creative-industries office job, who is studiously ignoring the spectres summoning her to political action.

The poem reminds us that Mao Zedong once said “imperialism is ferocious”. But “who has leisure time for revolution these days?” Who even “has time to remember?”

“Remember me,” we might recall, is the plea of the ghost of old Hamlet.

Review: The Rot – Evelyn Araluen (University of Queensland Press)

If Araluen’s “girly” is something of a modern-day female Hamlet, she also has aspects of a female Caliban. After all, we are not in the medieval state of Denmark anymore. This is a settler colony with a “technocratic state”, and the girl of the poem is someone who feels “it’s so chic […] to swallow the rot and your profit on it.”

The line suggests that whatever has gone rotten in her keep cup includes the coloniser’s language, which Caliban, having been forced to learn, could turn to profit only by returning to sender with its messages reversed:

You taught me language, and my profit on’t, Is, I know how to curse.

Araluen’s worker girl, by contrast, swallows the curse along with the rot: a bitter brew of moral compromise and self-betrayal. No wonder she needs “some bog time and a cigarette”.

The poem is characteristic of Araluen’s new collection in multiple respects. One is its deft mixing of high literary allusions and deflationary contemporary realities. Another is the sharp twists of its humour. Araluen’s keep-cup Hamlet was only one of a whole series of lines that had me laughing out loud.

Return to sender

Araluen’s debut, Dropbear (2022), was one of the highest-selling collections of poetry in living memory in Australia. In 2015, critic Ben Etherington observed that “the most celebrated or popular Australian poetry volume will struggle to sell 1000 copies”. Within a year of publication, Dropbear had sold around 20 times that figure, and its sales only continue to rise.

It was also critically well-received. Among other accolades, Dropbear won the Stella Prize, the first book of poetry to do so.

Araluen’s project in Dropbear was, roughly speaking, a literary decolonisation of the stock tropes and images of settler Australiana, particularly those of snugglepot childhood. She satirically returned them to sender in a Caliban-like reversal.

The reasons for Dropbear’s remarkable success were many, not least that it was an astonishingly strong first collection. Another important factor was surely the resonance of its project with the heightened public attention, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement and in the lead-up to the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to parliament in 2023, to the enduring racist legacies of Australia’s colonial history.

The politics of The Rot stem from a darker time. If still angry, this book also feels sadder. Despair cannot pass without acknowledgement, and the poignancy of the antidotes that are offered rests in their self-evident inadequacy.

Over every page of the book, however sharp or funny, hangs the horror of a threatened violence that seems to have already occurred – a violence that has “always already” occurred, I should say, for that theoretical shorthand captures the traumatic scrambling of temporality.

The book is haunted by complicity, and it is haunting in its insistence on remembering every betrayal. Dropbear was committed to the power of poetry to roll back the terrors and violence of colonialism. The Rot, more bereft, seems unsure.

‘You’ poems

Girl Work! is also characteristic of the collection in being addressed to “you”. It calls out its subject directly:

you’ve got affirmations to rehearse to the backing vocals of a doomsday podcast indexing our crimes against the earth

What are you going to do about it? Keep on affirming doomsday? Keep on with the keep cup?

More than half of the 50 poems in The Rot are apostrophes directed towards a second person. These “you” poems include the final poem in the first of the collection’s three sections, which is titled simply You, and the last poem in the collection, which is titled I Will Love, but does not include the first-person pronoun “I” in the text.

There is instead an insistent address to “you” – a “you” that is doubled in the poem’s final line, which is itself repeated:

until love kills you you will love until love kills you you will love

Not until halfway through the book do we have a poem that is clearly voiced in the first person. And even there the “I” who speaks is not Araluen in any direct sense, for the sentences of this poem are drawn from actor Rosalie Kunoth Monk’s “I am not the problem” speech from the television show Q&A in 2014.

Grammatically, “you” is classed as a shifter: its object is determined by the situation in which it is uttered. Its field of reference is notably shifting and unstable in Araluen’s hands.

“You” takes in the reader, whoever that reader may be. It also includes “girls”, from girlhood to working girls. The collection is dedicated to “my girls, and the world you will make.” The acknowledgements at the back of the book reiterate that “in most ways this is a book for girls”.

But the category of “girls” is treated as remarkably flexible and capacious, not least because, as the acknowledgement immediately goes on to note, “a girl is so many things”.

“You” in this collection is also the poet, addressing herself in moments of self-reflection and self-abstraction, sharing a little more of what she calls her “selectively over-exposed life”. Talking to herself, she is also talking to us, and to girls everywhere. She is talking to you.

This “you”, then, is a mobile, uncertain subject. But through its insistent repetitions, it takes on a gravity seemingly unavailable to “I”.

“We” is more precarious still. It is a fragile collective always in construction, rather than being any assumed or stable subject of speech.

Third-person speech – talking about what “she” did – is even more marginal, while there is almost no talking about what “he” did at all. The word man (or men) is consistently blacked out in these poems, as if redacted. At least, that’s what I took to be the obliterated word, though I cannot be sure, which is surely part of the point.

Decomposition in the citadel of life

The “you” in these poems takes on force and significance as the collection proceeds. Araluen’s poems call on you; they address you; they summon you.

Their consistent second-person orientation underwrites the book’s aesthetic cohesion. The poems are diverse formally and tonally, and address a wide range of subjects, from sleepless nights and witnessing war at a distance to Indigenous decolonial theory and the diary of Sofia Tolstoy. Yet The Rot reads to me almost as a lyric novel in its sustained attention to the feeling or affect of politics today.

I read the book through for this review, and then read it again, so perhaps I was primed to overestimate its coherence: its status as a unified project rather than an assemblage of independent poems. But even a less sequential reading could not miss The Rot’s looping of themes and figures, its extended elaborations of nagging questions and sticky ideas.

Take rot, which is in the keep cup on the commute to work. It is also a bodily thing: the gangrenous rot in the wound. Bodily pain – the ache of the body’s memory – looms large in these poems.

Rot is also digital, as is memory itself. Online links break; photos and videos disappear. Blank spaces open up like lesions in personal experience, as they do in the public record. Rot is psychic and social, and also celestial: this is, you read, the age of rotting stars. And rot is gendered for this prophet of rotting girls.

The book chronicles the present as a period of general degradation and decay, relentless destruction, a period of

decline in function and or appearance decomposition in the citadel of life

Rot is

what’s left before there’s nothing left

This is exactly where you are in this book. While often genuinely funny, The Rot is also grim and unremitting and bleak.

The last poem invites you to

grow seed in the ash from this rot grow love

But that final hopeful turn feels as if it has been pre-emptively undercut by lines such as: “Call it pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the dumb bitch.” Even revolutionary will appears to have rotted away, leaving resistance a wholly faded memory.

In a poem halfway through the book, “you” send a text message to your father “on your way to vote on a constitutionally enshrined mechanism for colonial collaboration” – in other words, on the Voice.

The messages reads: “all I can think of is Palestine”.

He replies: “it’s a fucked world, but we’re standing against the tide”.

The next entry in the poem abruptly materialises that casual metaphor. The tide rolling in on you is a flood of death bearing the rotting carcasses of innumerable creatures.

This is not, I think, a literary politics that will find as broad a popular audience as Araluen’s first book. But in its downbeat depressive brilliance, The Rot offers an eerie insomniac beauty, attuned precisely to our dark times.

No, that’s not quite correct. They are not “our” dark times in this book; they are yours. This is a book for your dark times. And the unanswerable question it poses is whether you – and it – can outlast them.

Thomas H. Ford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.