Landhaus Fellow Jake Goetz Shortlisted for Australian Prize in Poetry
12.03.2025
Jake Goetz who is currently at the Rachel Carson Center as a Landhaus fellow has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry.
His most recent work of poetry, Holocene Pointbreaks (Puchner & Wattmann, 2024), written during the COVID-19 lockdown, “presents a triptych of long poems that link three unique ecologies located on the Countries of the Dharawal and Eora Nations (Sydney and the South Coast). An eco-archival experiment in poetic composition, or poetic composting, the work interrogates colonial histories of resource extraction, taking the reader from morning reflections on one of Australia’s most polluted urban waterways, the ‘Cooks River’, to a discursive rumination on cetaceans while whale watching from the cliffs of Kamay, before digging down into Australia’s colonial ‘coalture’ on the NSW South Coast.” (The Wheeler Centre)
The winner—two other works are shortlisted for the prize—will be announced at the awards ceremony in Melbourne on 19 March 2025.
Jake came to the RCC with a project on a bioregional and anti-canonical survey of First Nations and settler poets who have created expansive, place-based long ecopoems that prioritize a more open-ended, relational, and ethical approach to writing ecologies in Australia.
An extract from Holocene Pointbreaks can be viewed in the file below.
The RCC would like to warmly congratulate Jake on this wonderful achievement!
Downloads
- Holocene Pointbreaks Excerpt (440 KByte)