‘Raw, sharp and compelling, each poem in swell takes a moment, idea, or memory and asks – where does it hurt?’ Ella Frears

‘Precise as the seams of muscle, with the revelatory, gasping acidity of over-exertion; you will be changed once you leave the compression of these membranous poems!’ Antosh Wojcik

‘swell excavates relationships, memory, and geography with tenderness and wit. The people and animals we encounter are memorable, glimmering between metaphor and visceral reality. An impressive debut.’ Lila Matsumoto

Local writer Christopher Lanyon’s playful, topographical poems embody what it means to swell: in the rising and falling breath of landscape, in the joyous vulnerability of intense friendship and love, in the wake of the inexorable changes to which body and world are bound. This pamphlet takes a kaleidoscopic view of the material; full of flex and growth, feather and claw. In dialogue with fathers and poets, quarries and coastlines, Lanyon asks who we are, and who we want to be.