Gig Ryan’s edgy, excoriating poetry takes the pulse of urban Australia, but her territory is as much the human rat-race and the hell of contemporary life as the particular lives she seizes upon with icy, ironic precision. Her range of reference brings together heroes, heroines and put-upon mortals of both ancient and modern times: slaves and moneygrabbers, pretenders and worshippers of ephemera and effluvia, for whom ‘I continue my existence as a negative role-model / bathing in the blood of others / sitting in a cone of noise.’
‘Postmodern poetry discovers its classical voice…Her monologues have a fragmentary quality, as if spoken in a post-Poundian landscape littered with broken statues’ – Michael Hulse, Poetry Review.
‘Abrupt, pared-back, given to juxtapositions that reshape the urban world her poetry evokes with satirical insight and a dry wicked humour, Ryan’s poetry is no easy thing... More the demotic of a dystopia than the vernacular of a republic, Ryan’s use of language – its truncation, tautness and drama – cuts equally across the body politic and the scene of poetry. Throughout all of this, her humour, insight and tight music both test and engage the reader. She gives street-learning a classical voice; post-modernism, experience’ – Michael Brennan, Poetry International Web.
Australia: Giramondo Publishing.
