Rock Dreaming

Neil Creighton’s poems insist that it is time, long past time, to acknowledge crimes against indigenous people, to stop cloaking and hiding past colonialism and current racism with lies, to shine a light of honesty on what the legacy of the white invasion of Australia really is, and to begin creating a space of hope for healing. Painful, powerful, and truly necessary poetry.-Laura M. Kaminski, Managing Editor of Praxis Magazine Online and Author of five poetry collections and four chapbooks, including Anchorhold and The Heretic’s Hymnal

It is astonishing how Rock Dreaming reasserts Australia’s precolonial history, confronts her colonial history, rewrites the history, and transcends its endless tyranny with a great anger, a greater insight, and a much greater empathy capable of healing the oppressed. The magic of this collection is rooted in Creighton’s humane attention to the details of the conditions of the people whose lives his poems explore so powerfully.

-Darlington Chibueze Anuonye, Curator of Daybreak: An Anthology of Short Nigerian Fiction

The poems in Rock Dreaming approach their difficult subject matter in many ways. They are lyrical, journalistic, deeply personal, and historical. Often confronting, unflinching, almost cinematically brutal, they seek justice but never self-justification. In them Creighton seeks to gouge a path of acknowledgment straight into the heart of national conscience. The poems reveal a tender heart and a desire to educate the reader about a buried history of genocide. We can only hope that works such as these can incite sufficient indignation and compassion to lead to whatever reparations are still possible.

-Betsy Mars, Author of Alinea