Keri Glastonbury’s new poetry collection, 51 Alterities is a humorous riff on austerity and otherness, which arrives on the page, in part, as a reimagining of Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities (2012).
51 Alterities: quick links
51 Alterities: infused with an Australian lens
For an Australian Associate Professor of Creative Writing such as Glastonbury, a response to austerity seems timely, considering recent cuts in creative arts programs. Yet where Riviere mapped the mood of post-GFC Britain, Glastonbury infuses this new collection with an Australian lens. This work leaps beyond economics towards 51 experiences of ‘otherness’ – queer, feminist and global-cultural alterity.
Like Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets, this collection is self-satirising, as it takes a humorous swipe at the ‘tech-bro-ligarchy’ of 2025 as well as ‘family geometries’. Titles appear inside square brackets [like this], as though the contents page has been coded and depersonalised in computer language, like Python or JavaScript. There are no titles on the poem pages themselves.
In this way, both [the monument has no plaque] and [the sun streaming through] become fragments of something removed, something pulped and irrelevant or deleted from a collection which is mostly presented unpunctuated, in duck-the-patriarchy lower case. A ‘whiff of cologne’ or a ‘mood-swing’ on ‘salad days’ comment on a culture that is coming apart, as casually as a social media status update.
51 Alterities: pushes the sonnet form
If Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets bent the sonnet sequence, 51 Alterities pushes beyond the 14-line form, leaning into free verse and prose poetry. ‘Verse poetry’ soon becomes ‘vs. poetry’, in a work which offers a playful list of things J K Rowling would ‘turf’ and O J Simpson would consider ‘appealing’.
Form is explored with a gentle if sardonic touch, which occasionally ripples into tercets or wave forms. Despite refusing the rules, this work compresses inside the idea of a sequence, without resorting to the narrative progression of a Renaissance sonnet. Glastonbury explains this as an attempt to ‘rid’ the work of the sonnet form.
51 Alterities: musicians and the internet as linking themes
Like Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her diary of the need to take ‘direct and instant shots’ at her target, Glastonbury also gets in and out quick. Here you will find no literary gymnastics or calculation of syllables and lines. Rather than pushing around the idea of a place, this sequence uses musicians and the internet as linking themes. As Sarah Holland Batt writes in Fishing for Lightening, the university receives a healthy skepticism in Glastonbury’s hands. As with the Newcastle Sonnets, the Vice-Chancellor once again takes one for the team, while the poet attempts to pass off poetry as ‘non-traditional research’.
The discipline of a unified form allows this work to get straight to the point, whatever that point may be. Though the ramblings are at times opaque, they always invite the reader into their bricolage from ‘nepo-boys’ to Nick Drake. The result is a little bit π.O, perhaps a little bit Lisa Collyer in its approach to splicing ideas, though Glastonbury’s personal investment in all of this is usually placed at a safe, if mocking distance.
[goodnight John-Boy] asks ‘where does your family sit on the Walton’s trauma scale. With a name like mine, I can relate. There are mixtapes and Starlink satellites glittering across Carly Simon skies while Ghislaine Maxwell sketches in court.
This is a crumbling world, though it still amusing. While passages play with chatGPT prompts, Bukowski attends a poetry slam, as Cold Chisel sing ‘Saturday Night’ at the Enmore Theatre. Riviere himself becomes a ‘hot textual object’ before the book signs off, ‘Sincerely, K. Glastonbury,’ in a salute to Leonard Cohen.
51 Alterities: traditionalists will squirm
Where Helen Garner is said to have an razor’s eye for detail, the same might be said for Glastonbury, who also observes the raw, and sometimes uncomfortable truths of ordinary life, and meets it all without judgement. Fragments of culture and counterculture and Laurel Canyon culture break out the Tupperware as real estate agents mess around on Facebook Marketplace. Almost every page carries a reference to music, mixed with films, landlords and a typing school, too. No doubt traditionalists will squirm as they try to decipher what these adventures in poetry mean.
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This is an eclectic and enjoyable mix of irreverent blues matched with sonorous syntax. Words are thrown into stanzas like gods into a shopping basket as the wild ride unhinges. Glastonbury once again presents an urgent voice that speaks to the crisis of contemporary times without fleeing to the moral high ground, sentimentality or victimhood.
51 Alterities by Keri Glastonbury is published by Giramondo.
