After the Demolition

Philosophical questions of reality and duality underpin many of the poems in Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition, leading to a sense of rebuilding and remembrance in the aftermath of abodes. Frost’s poetic is a kind of antipodean neo-Gothic, interjecting female corporeality into a quirky, queer, feminist alter-poetic for living and dwelling.

‘This book has multiple fire exits. This book has too many keys. You can climb through a window into this book. Some of these poems are not on the lease, and you are willing to take it all the way to the Residential Tenancies Authority.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says 'a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’. These poems ask what proofs of stability we build when our homes and selves are in perpetual flux.

After the Demolition is about rebuilding as much as it is about taking apart. It is about moving, and about moving on - what we leave behind, and what we attach more firmly to ourselves. When a place is gone - because we’ve given the keys back, or because the locks are lopped off - our attachment can drive us towards saudade, nostalgia, replication. We mythologise the flaws of our past haunts and past lives, and this determines the ways we start over when everything is air rights.‘ - Zenobia Frost