<p>Using the Rorschach inkblots as metaphors, conjuring the wondrous and the monstrous in his poems, Toby Fitch brings a new vision and shape to Australian poetry. Old modes of expression - such as the mythic, the romantic, the symbolic and the surreal - are revived and reshaped in poems that mythologies love, anxiety, the self and city living, dovetailing inner and outer worlds with a healthy antipodean dose of absinthe and concrete poetry.<br />
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<em>'Toby Fitch&#39;s title sequence from Rawshock opens onto hell - and onto a Eurydice who seems more knowing than she used to, whose eyes tell of gay abandon as well as the old emptying pain. These poems are a fresh, vivid working-through of the myth - a myth that keeps reminding us there&#39;s nothing new under the sun, except when poets strike indelible lines from newly minted words charged with the currents of daily usage. The tone is dark, not bitter; the language maps the landscape of an electrified underground: there is music here, but no birds sing in the trees. The artwork is as skilful as the fine handling of the lines, making poetry anew.'</em> - Robert Adamson<br />
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<em>'Apollinaire of Avalon, Lorca of the Inner West - no such comparison, close as it comes, quite does this collection justice. This is simply one of the freshest and most promising new voices we&#39;ve heard in Australia in years, undiluted, intense, Orphic, daring, with surprise in almost every line, word-play reminiscent of Mallarme - and (at last!) an exciting, uninhibited use of the page. Surely one of the poetry books of the year.'</em> - David Brooks</p>