Newcastle Sonnets

Once a working-class heartland, Newcastle is now acclaimed as one of the top 5 hipster cities in the world. In the sequence of sonnets which compose her homage to Newcastle, Glastonbury celebrates the city's oddities and contradictions, remixing the material effects of gentrification with the regional vernacular and punk drama of locally based social media – blogs, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Google Maps.

An antipodean, regional queering of Ted Berrigan’s New York-based Sonnets, Glastonbury’s poems make music from what's around, embracing both DIY chutzpah and the swipes, likes, and filtered screens of internet culture. This is Newcastle in cosplay, part eggs benedict, part pebblecrete, where a coal boat named 'Fiction' is always approaching the shore.

About the Author

Keri Glastonbury is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and collections. She has been the recipient of the Australia Council’s BR Whiting Residency in Rome and an Asialink Literature Residency in India. Her previous poetry collections include Grit Salute (Papertiger, 2012).