WASTELANDS explores the echoing spaces of a depleted sacred landscape in search of a new waste poetics: an alternative to the unified maps and narratives of popular mythology. As the poems hunt for ways to navigate emergent and sometimes dangerous forms of environmental memory, they traverse the ruined lands of quest and pilgrim literature, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Lewis Carroll’s tragicomic The Hunting of the Snark. Place-making becomes a weave of textual rubble, poetic ritual, and more-than-human mappings in a situated, sonic ‘re-knitting’. Like Shakespeare’s pearls that were eyes, the stuff of everyday life, thrown out as rubbish, returns transformed, newly energised, sometimes magical, more often toxic and demonic. The waste wildernesses encountered here are not just haunted, permeable, and layered places of loss, but are pervasive, restless, and full of agency. Not places apart but part of us and the perilous ways we model reality.

Wastelands is Susie’s debut collection, following two pamphlets/booklings, Tenter and The Sleeping Place, both illustrated by Rose Ferraby and published by Guillemot.

ISBN 978-1-913749-68-2 / 136 pages / 184 × 140mm / made with Favini Crush Cacao, Woodstock Rosso, and Arena papers.
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