Cordite Books (Castlemaine, Australia)
Paperback, 78pp.
ISBN: 9780645761696
Introduction by Liam Ferney
The contents of Transition Vamps span three decades of transitions in my writing life: from the mid-to-late 2000s in Melbourne, Seoul, Den Haag and Amsterdam, to the 2010s in Karlskrona, Stockholm and Gustavsberg, and the early 2020s in Paris and Fryslân.
As I wrote in my book announcement back in October 2025, Transition Vamps follows (stumbles? staggers?) in the footsteps of my two earlier poetry collections: Leaves of Glass (2013) and We Will Disappear (2007).
Given that I lived in Sweden for eleven years, it’s probably no surprise that a fair number of the poems in Transition Vamps were written there.
In fact, it was in Sweden that I returned to self-publishing after a long break, putting together a chapbook of poems, entitled Övergången [The Transition] in 2011 in English and Swedish. Övergången was followed by two digital-only chapbooks whose contents were also heavily focused on my experience living in Sweden: Tjugotvå (2012) and Fem Kronor (2013).
But then, at one point in 2013, everything changed. At that time, I was heavily invested in my job as a research editor at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. At the end of the year, we travelled to Australia for the launch of Leaves of Glass and discovered that K– was pregnant with our first child.
By the time I returned to Stockholm, my perspective on writing had undergone a transformation. Despite a flurry of reissues and white label chapbooks I produced on the sly on the institute’s awesomely expensive Ricoh printer, I came to the realisation that I wasn’t in the headspace to write new poems, and I was totally okay with that.
In fact, between the appearance of ‘drift: a way’ (in Continent. in 2013) and ‘(OCCULUS) RIFTS’ (in Cordite Poetry Review in 2025), I did not publish a single new poem in a literary journal. It wasn’t that my work was being rejected (although that’s what’s happening now): I just wasn’t writing anything.
To be fair, I had a number of poems published or republished in anthologies during that gaping 12-year hole in my poetry resume, but the fact remains that I was living a life sans poetry for most of that time.
Add two more children to the mix, a pandemic, and a change of jobs that sent us packing to Paris, and it became increasingly clear that it would require something pretty serious to break me out of the spell that was preventing me from writing or publishing.
language, poetics and meaning, gives the poems
in Transition Vamps their momentum. . . . The poems move with
the stutter step of a mouse’s scroll wheel and
the teleportation of a clicked link.
That turnaround occurred in late 2023, when I travelled to Ireland in search of my ancestors (a process which I later documented via memoir in my Substack newsletter). On my first day in the Republic, having travelled by plane from Paris to Shannon airport in Limerick, I began writing a homage to John Tranter’s poem, “Lufthansa”.
As documented elsewhere, my poem, which I called “Terminal 1: Aer Lingus”, took on the ‘terminal’ form that Tranter had experimented with for many years. I was really proud of the poem, which felt to me like a breakthrough, creatively speaking, and a lot of fun to write.
It also ended up being accepted in Best of Australian Poems 2024, which provided an indescribable boost to my confidence, after so long in the Swedish wilderness. Since then, I’ve submitted to numerous journals, with zero success, but in a way that doesn’t really matter anymore.
The poems in Transition Vamps span three decades of writing (and not writing). For example, I first wrote the final poem in the book, ‘Kus’, in 2006, while Övergången [The Transition] was written in 2011, shortly after I moved to Sweden for what I thought would be one year but turned out to be a decade.
By comparison, ‘Terminal 1: Aer Lingus’ and the three additional ‘terminal’ poems in the book were written in 2024 and 2025, and the individual poems for each of our children lay dormant inside me for many years before I was ready to write them.
As for the ‘vamps’ of the book’s title, well, I’m not actually sure what they have to do with anything, to be honest. But I have been listening to a lot of jazz-vamp instrumentals lately, and they certainly make for very nice writing background music.
I’m looking forward to launching Transition Vamps in person and will of course share further details as they come to hand. In the meantime, my October 2025 Substack post provides some extra context . . .