Dominique Hecq

Otopos unfurls a paradox: the interleaving and entangling of self and topos. It began with a loss of equilibrium impelling rhythmic departures, an incipient blood beat-- subcutaneous, through the feet all the way to the surface of the page. A Belgian native, I live and write on unceded Wurundjeri land in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. This makes me a paradox. An unsettled European out of place in a neighbourhood she calls home with its fenced, stolen and, too often, desecrated land. Who bears witness to political abstractions and aberrations yet fails to wholly reimagine or rematerialize these through poetry despite her attempt to uncover the regimes of terror of settlement perpetrated by the symbolic. Whose breath catches again and again. Otopos is a reckoning, an elegy, an ode to the Merri Creek trail that snakes through Melbourne's northern suburbs and colluvial slopes, teaming with native flora and fauna, but also imported weeds and predators, including humans. In its arrangement in three parts, the collection unfolds displaced fragments and glimpses of histories through call and response of landscapes and beings. The poetics active here is a poetics of the liminal: from word to word, line to line, space to space the narrative persona writes its shoreless existence, roaming as it does through lexicons and topographies.

Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium and now lives in Melbourne, Australia, and writes in English and in French. She has published a novel, six collections of her short stories, and thirteen poetry books and chapbooks, including "After Cage: A Composition in Word and Movement on Time and Silence" (Liquid Amber Press, 2022) and, most recently, the prose poetry sequence entitled "Songlines" (Hedgehog, 2023). She was a recipient of the Martha Richardson Medal for Poetry (2006) and the International Best Poets Prize from the International Poetry Translation and Research Centre in conjunction with the International Academy of Arts and Letters. This book won James Tate Prize for Poetry (2022).

Smacked is a moving collection of stories about addiction told with heart-stopping narrative control and emotional resonance.- Roanna Gonsalves, 2021 Carmel Digital Literary Award judge Runner-Up, 2021 Carmel Digital Literary Award Hecq writes playfully and with irony, thrumming prose and poetry in self-aware stories gravid with familiar yet unfamiliar protagonists and their dented victims or saviours. Smacked and other stories of addiction is a tight rope of connections and metaphors, the reader walking on tiptoe with a balancing pole, yet at the same time craving a haircut or a quince. -Eugen Bacon, author of Claiming T-Mo and The Road to Woop Woop & Other Stories DOMINIQUE HECQ grew up in Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne. Hecq writes across genres and sometimes across tongues. Her works include a novel, four collections of stories and eleven books of poetry. Tracks (2020) and Songlines (2021) are her latest offerings. With Eugen Bacon, she co-authored Speculate (2021), a microlit dialogue.

Dominique Hecq's latest collection is an autobiographical journey into the real and imaginary of Australia. With her 'faux-Romantic' preconceptions, Hecq arrives in Australia from Europe in 1985, after a long fascination with the literature of a country she would eventually call home. Spanning thirty years, Tracks fictionalises this journey of uncovering the complex layers of a foreign land and of discovering its people, places and prejudices.

'Dominique Hecq writes through dulled topographies of mourning, avowing death is a "singular fear of finitude against a background of black light." Autobiographical, and sharply particular, Hush takes readers into an abyss where "grief is a caesura" and loss means "being hostage to a ghost." But this book is not only a poignant elegy to "losing your mother tongue and cracking your own voice"; Hush is also an incandescent lament from an "un / harmed" speaker locating the possibilities and lexicons of d nouement. Silencing the undertones of a surpassing grief, Hecq's quest is finally epic and heroic.'--Dan Disney "Life goes on, they say," says Dominique Hecq in her startling and moving new book of lined and prose poetry, Hush. Then, "Life goes on leaving." A response to the death of a child, charting the near death and revival of a marriage and family, Hush is the lyric meditation of a true scholar, deeply inflected by theory but driven by the urgencies of the body. Early and late, it poses unanswerable questions - "Why is white white?" - and answers them by returning to the world of "Chalk, rice, zinc / / Crystal falls / / " and, devastatingly, "Limestone graves," before the language of the world disintegrates. Seeming at first to span a year of seasons, then suddenly encompassing fifteen years, the poem charts a remarkable inner journey, which begins in starvation, a refusal of the sensuous, but finally recollects not joy so much as presence. The world reemerges in water, birds, flowers, and most of all food, prepared at first as sacrifice, for others, until it makes itself present-first through color but also through smell, through sound, and literally through ink - and becomes the poet's communion.--Katharine Coles, University of Utah (Series: UWAP Poetry) Subject: Poetry]

This book offers an in-depth study of the poetics of creative writing as a subject in the dramatically changing context of practice as research, taking into account the importance of the subjectivity of the writer as researcher. It explores creative writing and theory while offering critical antecedents, theoretical directions and creative interchanges. The book narrows the focus on psychoanalysis, particularly with regard to Lacan and creative practice, and demonstrates that creative writing is research in its own right. The poetics at stake neither denotes the study or the techniques of poetry, but rather the means by which writers formulate and discuss attitudes to their work.

This book offers an in-depth study of the poetics of creative writing as a subject in the dramatically changing context of practice as research, taking into account the importance of the subjectivity of the writer as researcher. It explores creative writing and theory while offering critical antecedents, theoretical directions and creative interchanges. The book narrows the focus on psychoanalysis, particularly with regard to Lacan and creative practice, and demonstrates that creative writing is research in its own right. The poetics at stake neither denotes the study or the techniques of poetry, but rather the means by which writers formulate and discuss attitudes to their work.