Rallying

Give, yourself, names.' then presents us with a fourteen-page poem in which the poet moves swiftly, however fragmentedly, from a little girl who cares for her sister, to a heroin addict and sex worker, to a male writer. If 'rallying' is the action of coming together to support a person or cause, or the action of digging into the depths of one's capability to keep going, then in this first book of poetry, Quinn Eades is in full-on rallying mode, supporting the body in writing it raw, and writing it raw in order to keep the body going. Rallying has its foundations in feminist theory, and I read it as a book that could easily be added to the canon of Australian feminist poetry, but the debate on whether or not trans bodies are bodies that can speak for feminists is real. (142) 'Hole' and 'habitus' and 'change' repeat throughout the dense seven-page poem so that even the easily-lost-in particularly difficult poetry can return to the core, which is the body in its lacking, in its social positioning, in its transition and, as the poem ends, as 'Re/produced', also a play on the poem's structure.