Second Fleet Baby examines birth and motherhood, with a consciousness that spans centuries. This poetry draws on the energies of 18th Century English convict women, including Rhook’s own ancestors, to open raw questions of belonging. How might a settler reconcile the violence bound up with their role populating stolen land with the love and euphoria that can flow from parenthood? Intergenerational ties are traced through the soft weapons of the body, connecting the intimacies of nation-making with the politics of reproduction in lavishly personal ways. Through stories of childhood, of fertility, and of nurturing new life during a pandemic, the patriarchal weight of history is cast off and origins are pulled 'from the seabed to the surface'.
‘Extraordinary craftswomanship, tender yet piercing stories of nation-building and child-bearing, intricately woven together by the hands of an astute and fearless poet.’
- Elfie Shiosaki
‘In these wide-ranging, self-questioning, imaginative poems, Rhook tracks how colonisation works against and through the bodies of women. The poems are shaped by a rare combination of judgement and compassion.’
-Lisa Gorton
‘Second Fleet Baby is both a mesmerising poetry collection and a unique addition to the field of women and post-colonial studies.’
-Limina
The past lives in every step.
boots are here a symbol and a tool – a heel of feminine desire and a dirt-trodden shoe that cushions feet on paths to power and property, leaving trails of violence and pain. Memories jump and jar in these poems, loosening history from the grip of archives and footnotes to nourish the imagination, freeing me to speak back to my ancestors and the European men who co-created the edifices of 19th Century colonisation. boots looks in mirrors and across seas to dream big. At its restless heart, it draws history closer to my body.
‘Like “a compulsory streak of lightning in an optional summer sky”,.. [these] poems speak to the regrets of memory and the terrors of complicity’.
- Rashida Murphy
‘The poems in boots… grapple head-on with what it means to write as a settler in a colony - with the ongoing reality of violence, theft and denial. They know that every place we walk is shadowed, contested… Rhook strives always for a clearer vision: “turning away from the refreshing breeze of guilt/finding a sunburnt way to see what’s happened here”.’
- Melinda Smith
‘boots’ indexes a rich and subtle engagement with archival sources, decolonial theory, and much contemporary Indigenous writing... This book is exquisitely self-aware, and in its labour of thinking-through exorcises residual nostalgias for blood and soil and crimson kinship to arrive at something like an ethical liminality.’
- Jonathan Dunk