Books by Alison Croggon

A woman on the verge of a breakdown begins to hear the voice of a mediaeval mystic. The convict wife of an Australian settler faces the bloody price of colonisation. A man murders his wife and flees to a country town. A girl is visited by a vampire and uncovers her hidden past.In these four hallucinatory texts for theatre, written over the past two decades, the past is never dead: its violence reaches into the fractured present. Croggon’s characters struggle through a world alienated by trauma. Some find their truths: others remain lost. Disturbing, ecstatic, ambiguous, affirming, these poems for the stage unpick the seams of reality, opening the dark places of memory.Alison Croggon’s work encompasses poetry, novels, criticism and texts for performance. She has had sixteen works produced in Australia, both libretti and plays. They include The Riders, winner of the Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Art Music Awards, and Mayakovsky, shortlisted for the drama prize in the 2015 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards. Her award-winning novels and collections of poetry have been widely published in the US, UK and Europe as well as in Australia. She was named 2009 Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year and her selected critical essays, Remembered Presences, was recently published by Currency Press.

I'm a flesher through and through. I do all the fleshers things. Fall in love, cry, laugh, rage to the trance mobs. All the things that back in Newport City they envy us for, all the authentic things that they don't know how to do any more because their DNA is so clean and squeaky. I've got all the feelings.And feelings are trouble. I know that too.Dez is a flesher, scraping a living in the banns of Newport. When she accidentally kills a cop during a routine raid and then discovers that Newport City OpSec is planning to exterminate millions of fleshers, everything begins to unravel. She and her family are determined to stop the cull, but their only allies are the bent cop Brian Mac and a shadowy group called the Alchems. What chance does this unlikely band of renegades have against the full force of OpSec? What follows will test them to their limits, as they're plunged into the most desperate struggle of their lives.The first in a dazzling new science fiction series from best-selling fantasy author Alison Croggon and acclaimed playwright Daniel Keene.

Raw, passionate and dazzling, Alison Croggon's poetry confronts a world fractured by different kinds of violence - patriarchal, colonial, sexual and emotional - and finds there a difficult beauty. Selected Poems 1991-2017 demonstrates the full range of her art: formally inventive, intellectually curious and stylistically assured.