The Flaw in the Pattern

Highly Commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript

‘This is an alive, refreshing and, quite literally, elemental book of water and skin, muscle and fire. Rachael Mead’s poems are immediate and grounded whilst entwined with fragility and struggle. They don’t shy from the difficulties and sadness as well as joy in human kinship. Along the way Mead offers us a clear-eyed self-consciousness of the human within the larger places of the earth, in this case places such as Antarctica, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, Ikara-Flinders Ranges. The book offers us an embodied sense of secular ritual in its attentiveness and its use of form - lists, lyric iterations, admonitions - as the poet both argues and confides with herself and us, about the wild pleasures of earth’s physical and emotional topographies, and of our responsibilities within all this. A powerful and invigorating book of journeys well worth taking.’ - Jill Jones