Moon Wrasse

SHORTLISTED: Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

COMMENDED: Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry.

[A] voice… unique in Australian poetry, questing, hesitant, humble, and open, attuned to the frequencies almost inaudible, to the ‘bird-note, gently caught / at the very edge of things’…. This is a collection ‘that knows the pace of poem-time’, the poems fully engaged in the ‘work of gathering’, quiveringly alive with sensory details, shimmering with luminosity that is like wisdom. Judges’ Report, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

… a fluid and tender book about transformation across identity, grief, gender and relationship. The poems reach beyond any subject matter a reader may impose… The notion of constant change and flux, inherent in the natural environment and therefore in the human …elevates this collection. — Angela Costi, Amanda Anastasi and Nicholas Powell. Judges’ report, Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry

…a complex, intriguing and quite exciting first book …a world of liminality and transformation …which poses questions about the nature and possibilities of lyric poetry. — Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review.

Moon Wrasse is a book of powerful intelligence and careful restraint that unites grief and joy in ways that are both precise and expansive. It is a book that transforms grief into something entirely new… reminding the reader that we are all in a state of becoming. — Magdalena Ball reviews Moon Wrasse at Compulsive Reader.

Moon Wrasse reveals [the] idea of a porous self, evolving and re-evolving in conversation with other poetic voices, the environment, and the complicated interconnections that make us deeply human… luminous and complex poetic material. — Sophie Finlay, TEXT.

…a brilliant piece of work …[with] a deft yet light touch that…communicates volumes…an expansiveness of voice made complex through slippage, but simultaneously, undeniably whole.— Lisa Collyer and Catherine Noske, JASAL

…a shimmery collection of poetry…. luminous and multilayered… — Thuy On, Arts Hub.

…the sense of literary transformation… is palpable… a brilliant book of poetry that reflects the vivid diversity and invention which is becoming characteristic of Australian poetry. Any reader of poetry will find satisfaction in these pages.— Sam Ryan, Australian Book Review.

Moon Wrasse extends the poetics of Rilke and Levertov, emphasising immersive conversations with the world… highlight[ing] the profound connection between self/other, the environment/body, second sight/inscription…This book is an homage to love and magick and finding ways to reinscribe very necessary and vital voices and existences that have slipped/been silenced/written over/unpublished/forgotten.— Misbah Wolf, Mascara Literary Review.

The lyric mode—for Drummond—becomes a way to decouple language from its enmeshment in the program destroying the world / destroying the possibility for lyric poetry in the first place.— Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne, Plumwood Mountain Journal.

Moon Wrasse is bounteous, sinuous and queer, haunting in its embrace of grief, shifting identities, and transformation. Here is an invigorating fertility of voice, especially notable in the book’s agile sonics, its hum of presence, and its ardent dialogue with other poets and writers. This is a striking and richly lyrical debut, vibrant in its singing, intensely mobile, and compelling in its recuperative gestures. – Jill Jones 

Willo Drummond’s poetry is exhilarating for its balance of the visceral, the intuitive and the intellectual. Intimate and tender experience is framed and reframed with deep reading both of other poets’ work and the more-than-human world, in innovative ways. ­– Felicity Plunkett

Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse is a trillion fragments held lightly, a love letter, a glimmer flick at the corner of an eye. Here is a poet who writes with exceptional clarity; who gifts us queer and trans bodies, lives, and ecologies. Desire, pain, love and hope play in and through this collection that simultaneously shimmers and cuts. On these pages you will find bodies touching, turning, and all ways transforming; ghost orchids, grasses, the quiet shadow work of roots and moths… On these pages you will find ‘a message in the moss’. This is a collection to come back to many times, with and through the body, with love. – Quinn Eades