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Zenobia Frost

Zenobia Frost is a poet and arts writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Her most recent poetry collection, After the Demolition (Cordite Books, 2019), won the 2020 Wesley Michel Wright Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2020, she edited a book on the history of Brisbane Community Arts Centre: Art Starts Here: 40 years of metro arts.

'Turning the Indiana Bell', a poem by Zenobia Frost

November 2021, no. 437 25 October 2021
Imagine how the lightfell on their desks.Clerks in rotationelbowed into the ’30swith their heated officecoffee unimpeded. Telephones still rang.10,000 tons of progressswung in a month, stilltoilets flushed. Lunchrevolved on static gossippanning Indiana backdrop. The future comes at youat fifteen inches to the hour.The future marks youfor demolition. Butsometimes you’re spunoff-axis, feeling ... (read more)

‘A Midnight Visit’: Inside the mind of the great-granddad of goth

ABR Arts 31 August 2021
Broad Encounters’ A Midnight Visit – a touring multi-room immersive production – takes the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe as its inspiration. For Brisbane’s iteration, it transforms a soon-to-be-demolished building in Fortitude Valley into a funeral parlour and, beyond it, an uncanny, gothic dreamscape you explore at your own pace. ... (read more)

'Pliny the Younger to Tacitus' by Zenobia Frost | States of Poetry QLD - Series Two

States of Poetry Queensland - Series Two 20 October 2017
On Pompeii, 79AD The violence of that night. I satnotating Livy, throughthe earth’s contractions. A thin dawn-choked skyshook chariots. The crowd rolled backonto itself. Neptune threw up animals.Every thing convulsed. On the shoreacross, a great black cloud broke with light. Shrieks rang out: endlessnight, with gods up and gonelike wayward husbands. Then: the silent dark. We stoodto shake of ... (read more)

'St Marys, Tas' by Zenobia Frost | States of Poetry QLD - Series Two

States of Poetry Queensland - Series Two 20 October 2017
It’s a town with a veggie patchin the cop shop yard. Outside the grocer, with shelvesof tins and faded VHS tapes,a boy on a scooter asks,Are you looking for wi-fi? as ifhe’s bootlegged some to sell. In the café we bemoan the goat-trackwe drove in on: the Elephant Pass.Swaying huge and daft,the van was elephant enoughmid-slalom to have me swigging benzos. The sweetshop lady, who hand-makest ... (read more)

'Taming the Shrew' by Zenobia Frost | States of Poetry QLD - Series Two

States of Poetry Queensland - Series Two 17 October 2017
Maroochydore, 1999 – After 10 Things I Hate About You   A girls’ weekend. Just me, Mumand Blockbuster, probably fish ‘n’ chips,surely chocolate. Maybe I mistook the word menarchefor men-ache, watching Mum watch Heath Ledgercroon the song that she saidonce lured her into marriage: ‘You’re just too goodto be tru-oooooh—’ She sighed. I sighed, her mirror, on the motel’stwin ... (read more)

'before / now' by Zenobia Frost | States of Poetry QLD - Series Two

States of Poetry Queensland - Series Two 17 October 2017
\\ everything before wasfine \ sure \ orderly love\ I recollect \ aisles of exin home-brand \ sober\ procedural acts \ legby leg \ recipes for low-fat sex \ clear-cut \ pasttense \ a lab report onroutine me-and-thems \ but \\ oh // and then / emboss the date of Iand you / you effortless /a looping tune / in fluentcursive-fever / static skin/ somewhere these handsmust start / or end / askthem-ups ... (read more)