MacCarter evokes a world where high anxiety meets the prosaic, entertainment paranoia and trauma everyday incontinence. It ranges from the abattoirs of Flemington, ‘up to its neck in blood’, to episodes of Iron Chef. A series of sonnets is followed by prose poetry exploring the interstices of a matrix where ‘poached dollars bleed inside fissures’, and both artifice and coincidence inform a world of processes and products, and random instances of survival. The raw lines of ‘Agamemnon’s All Night Shift’ separate as ligaments or off-cuts between ‘cheap / pork belly futures’ and ‘skeletal / boredom, our muscle’, and prefigure the fates of livestock and disaster victims alike, ‘tumesced by elevation’ and consumed by airborne carnage, from which emerge only isolated and astonishing escapes.

Midway through the collection a form of resolution is achieved; a truce between people, procedures, and machines is hinted at, with ‘Sputnik’s cousin / tumbling wild it’s dormant locomotion / above a gravity / that’s rearranged to child’. Still, this relative space of quietude implies an intolerable vacuum, and soon the reader is returned to the visceral vortex of sights and sounds.

Although it may be easy for the uninformed reader to become lost in its labyrinth of names, images, and cultural tropes, Sputnik’s Cousin calls out from critical points of an unsettled collective consciousness, and succeeds in being electrifying and absolutely modern.