Most recent poetry collection with Upswell (2022)
languish
This collection of poems furthers Marion May Campbell’s lifelong interest in form, stretching to breaking point the potential of poetic language. She stages language as trickster, traitor and seducer, flamboyantly connecting and wiring the circuitry of desire, just as it silences and slices.
One moment, it stutters, teetering on the brink, and the next it transfigures loss in radiant dreamscapes, restoring ardour amongst the ruins of allegory. Languish is Campbell’s eleventh book across the forms of fiction, poetry and critical theory. Her writing is always charged by a poetics of feminist contestation.
Forthcoming 2027 with Puncher & Wattmann
from this morning
In its queer feminist perspective from this mourning finds torque in love’s aftermath, in violence survived, and in vistas of much wider disaster from this war-torn and ecologically threatened world, to recover a degree of wonder, or at the very least, endurance. Through the metamorphic pull of language, the speakers here find myriad other voices and incarnations. Bodies of water offer amniotic nurture for new emergences: the poems draw escape routes and new connections via motifs of fabulous identification and transformation – from termite, bird, emperor gum caterpillar, leopard, through to foil-winged angels and albino-finned mermen – whereby, even in radical expulsion, the personae find imaginative, and even exhilarating, modes of resistance.