TRIGGER WARNING
University of Queensland Press, 2021
Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets–from Sylvia Plath to Anne Carson–whose dramatised confessions trigger Takolander’s own. The second part remains focused on the domestic, while redeeming that scene of trauma through a reinventing wit. The final section of this extraordinary book turns its attention outside, playing with poetry itself in order to confront the Anthropocene and the final frontier of death. This is poetry that balances ruthlessness and lyrical beauty; poetry alive to its time and audience; poetry not to be missed.
‘The poems in Trigger Warning take no prisoners: fiercely intelligent, mordant and uncompromising, they stare down difficult subjects—domestic violence, the body’s frailty, the precarious future—with an unerring commitment to telling the truth, no matter the fallout. Whether sparring with confessional poets in spiky epistles, reconfiguring the seemingly banal surface of the domestic world, or divining the apocalyptic excesses of the late Anthropocene, Takolander fearlessly contemplates “the battleground of reason’s end,” forging sense in a sea of senselessness. Enlivened with wit and leavened with irony, Takolander’s poems in Trigger Warning are electrifying; their intellectual force is indisputable.’—Sarah Holland-Batt
‘Astonishing, analytic, ardent and confessional, Maria Takolander’s forensic tropes are a daring and highly skilled performance. With metonymy, irony and rhetoric, Trigger Warning insists on feminist difference as it wields unsentimental light defamiliarizing the everyday. These poems enclose crisis and purposely trouble culture and identity, asking questions that salvage language from the detritus—and ultimately, show us a way to heal.’—Michelle Cahill
‘A trigger releases a spring that sets off a mechanism . . . and so I began to read these scientist-poems of cardiac distress, sly curtains, igniting cacti, wooden fathers, love and disaster. Each time I returned to the book the mechanism was different and it fired anew. Maria Takolander’s poems are serious, eccentric, crotchety and comic. Their dazzling reach and querulous intelligence is astonishing. I was altered, and remain awed.’—Carrie Tiffany
‘In a folktale the child goes alone into the forest. It is real, and dreamlike. Deliberately, with dreamlike calm, Takolander goes into the night’s ‘sunless terrors’: death-dread, old grief, fallout. Terror, these poems say, is “the dark energy of the cosmos”. What can words do with that? What can they do against it? These poems are clear, practical, steady—and compelled to go into that mind-forest reason finds no way through.’—Lisa Gorton
‘Trigger Warning does everything I want a poetry collection to do: it rips up the sodden carpet of our lives and exposes what’s been swept under there; it runs naked down the corridor of who we are, past the ‘Toilet' & the ‘Valium-white Baby Monitor’ and finds us down behind the television ‘In the semi-dark’ our faces as ‘uncomprehending as moons’. These poems explode in me like quiet bombs, their aftershocks cascading till I am floating, limbless and lost, in the beautiful trauma of it all.’—Ali Whitelock
Honours
Winner of the 2022 $25,000 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award:
‘Maria Takolander’s fourth poetry collection shows the writer at the very peak of her form . . . The book is multi-layered, bolstered with incisive intellect and wit and underscored by an impressive range of tone, style and themes.’
Short-listed for the 2022 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal:
‘Takolander’s poetic skill is unfaltering. Overall, the collection . . . takes nothing for granted.’
Named a best book of 2021 in Australian Book Review.
Named in Readings’ ‘100 great reads from Australian women in 2021’.
Named in The Australian as one of the most anticipated book releases of 2021:
‘Maria Takolander, Australian short-story writer and poet of uncommon intelligence and style, brings us a new poetry collection with Trigger Warning.’
Named by Aniko Press in ‘Poetry Collections We Can’t Wait to Read in 2021’:
‘Takolander draws us sharply into her world with poetry purposefully and powerfully written for our current times.’
Reviews
‘Ruthless and beautiful all at once. . . . Unusual and fiercely intelligent, Trigger Warning will simultaneously unsettle you and set you alight.’—Cheryl Akle for The Australian.
‘Among these are poems that will resonate for decades. Takolander has a skill for rare and deep language-making in moments of gravitas; she brings into sharp focus what can and can’t be managed.’—John Kinsella for The Australian.
‘Exquisite in terms of language, but dark in implication . . . None of them land exactly where you expect them to.’—Geordie Williamson for The Australian.
‘A recent article suggested we had reached the pandemic condition of languishing. Things are what they are, and we are almost past caring. The most salutary antidote I can suggest is Trigger Warning, Maria Takolander’s scalp-stretching collection.’—Peter Kenneally for The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, WA Today, The Brisbane Times.
‘Vintage Takolander.’—Geoff Page for The Canberra Times.
‘Deserves to be placed on any reading list of contemporary Australian poetry.’—Martin Langford, Meanjin.
‘Brilliant.’—Declan Fry for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age.
‘A trauma-song unfolding in three parts, moving from intimate to public space. It is difficult to chose one poem to elevate from among such a carefully crafted whole.’—Melinda Smith for Australian Poetry Journal.
‘A sharp and arresting collection, fierce in its emotions and determination to make language do the hard work of speaking that which hovers at the edge of articulation.’—Rose Lucas for Australian Book Review.
‘Some of the most moving confessional and elegiac poems you’ll read anywhere.’—Gregory Day for Australian Book Review.
‘At times a deeply personal selection of poems, it left me in awe of a poet’s ability to trust and to share . . . a strong and compelling collection.’—Claire Millar for Readings.
‘Balances ruthlessness, literary playfulness and lyrical beauty.’—Readings.
‘Excellent.’—Carrie Tiffany for the New Zealand Herald.
‘To delve deeply into what and who we are and where we might be going. Maria Takolander does that both beautifully and at times painfully in her latest publication, Trigger Warning, the publication of which this month places her among the elite of Australian poetry.’—Warwick Hadfield for ABC Radio National.
‘Refuses to be categorised, playing around both boldly and intelligently with what books can do.’—Kate Evans, ABC Radio National, for UQP Critics Corner.
‘Interesting and intriguing . . . reflective, disturbing and cathartic . . . not easily forgotten.’—Janet Mawdesley for Blue Wolf Reviews.
‘In these poems, the domestically familiar is defamiliarised as family violence takes shape . . . speaks to something larger taking shape in the zeitgeist.’—Scott Patrick Mitchell for Out in Perth.