Element: the atomic weight and radius of love
Jordie Albiston

*Shortlisted for the 2020 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal*

Using chemistry as an indexing trope, Jordie Albiston tabulates the human predicament of love: its foundations and fundamentals, its configuration of emotions, its recurring properties and its inherent assumption of many as yet unknown elements to occur.  

These poems range across space and time, all the while adhering to the formal constraints of atomic theory.  The states and structures of being are scrutinised according to love's capacity for passion and fissure, blessing and debt, and a compound body of two is progressively mapped onto the page.

'Albiston's poetry cohesively resettles readers well beyond the usual linguistic boundaries, and by these means the poems sharply renew possibilities of enunciation.' —Dan Disney, Westerly