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Amy Brown

Ida, a secondary school teacher in Melbourne with a four-year-old daughter, Aster, in childcare, lives in a post-Covid world of masks, mindfulness apps, remote learning, and video calls. Recently relocated from New Zealand when her partner, a lecturer in Cultural Studies, is offered a more prestigious job at an Australian university, she has relinquished the possibility of continuing her own academic career. He seems unwilling to share household tasks or help to tend to their child, despite the fact that they are both working, and distances himself by immersing himself in his study and going on long runs. In the opening passage, we are presented with Ida’s childhood memory of being on a beach, where she pretends that she knows how to swim – or rather, that she has learned ‘how not to drown’ – which now seems an apt metaphor for her marriage.

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Amy Brown reads her poem 'Snake' which features in the 2016 Victorian anthology.

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When it was nearly still acceptable
to nip the shoulder of the pleasant boy
sitting cross-legged in front of you
(leaning back and pulling the royal blue

wool of his jersey with loose teeth)
I had an elastic idea, which stretched
through the next twenty-five years. Senior
primary school's kingdom of fully grown

flax bushes and adult-sized toilets,

We are following a track that loops
around a lake impaled with trees,
a pinned-down habitat for platypuses

I would like to see, so try to walk
silently until a shadow across the sun-
dried turf in front of me blushes

curls and slides down a bank.
I stop, tell you what I've seen, smile
at the luck. You jump onto a log.

For the rest of the wal ...


Amy BrownAmy Brown is a New Zealand poet, novelist and teacher who has lived in Melbourne for seven years. In 2012 she co ...