Gladland

Winner of the 2020 Niall Lucy Award

…nothing has changed then since high school, since Sydney in the 1980s with its garage bands and women’s marches and university bars and hungover Sunday recovery meals at the Malaya when it was still by Central Station, before we all became solid.

 

From the judges’ comments of the 2020 Niall Lucy Award:

A collection of intense and polemical poems, Gladland constitutes both and experiment in poetic form of elegy and the advancement of  a revolutionary theory of love and female desire under late capitalism.

Unfolding as a testimony to a life lived fully, wildly, in the face of a repressive and stultifying cultural mainstream, the poems drink deeply from popular culture, embracing a feminist pop/punk aesthetic that works as well in framing intimate moments as it does in documenting acts of ‘living out loud’ in the world.

The judging panel considered Bradley Smith’s Gladland to be a serious, provocative and exhilarating investigation of poetic form, feminist sensibilities and the commodification of love. A clever idea, brilliantly executed, it is a deserving winner of the 2020 Niall Lucy Award.

From the Afterword:

Gladland is a poetic tale of what heartbreak can and can’t do to a modern woman. Set to a 1970s psychosonic soundtrack, and staged in various cities from Detroit to Rome and Perth, these poems are glamrock operettas of everyday life, well-versed in its romantic absurdities and glories.