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Paul Dawson’s Lines of Desire mines the urgencies and paradoxes of contemporary Australian culture, from an agonistic self-interrogation of Asian-Australian identity to a skewering of the reductive categories of left and right in political debate. The poems are permeated by an awareness of the shaping hand of social media in our daily lives, while seeking to fashion a lyrical perspective from the conceptual language of philosophy and criticism.

The overarching thread of the collection is desire in its manifold forms, tracing lines of political activism, romantic yearning, sexual exploration, and poetic ambition. The first section, “In Theory,” develops a poetics out of a critique of storytelling before exploring the fault-lines of Australian cultural politics; the second section, “On the Page”, traces and satirises poetic ambitions emerging from Romanticism to Instagram; and the third section, “In the Flesh”, seeks embodied knowledge in our human response to the pandemic, lost love, and the natural world.

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Paul Dawson is a poet, scholar, and literary critic. He has published four books, including his first collection of poetry, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), which won the national IP Picks Best Poetry Award. Paul has been anthologised in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). His poems appear in many of Australia’s literary journals, including Meanjin, Island, Southerly, Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, and Mascara Literary Review. Paul teaches literary studies and Creative Writing in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.

Craig Billingham has published two collections of poems (Storytelling, 2007; Public Transport, 2017) and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews. Most recently, his work has appeared in The Saturday Paper, and on The Conversation website.

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