The Criminal Re-Register

Here are scrummed gangs of criminals and police, with all their lurks, quirks and argots. The underworld and its overlords: how ingenious and energetic, how ardent both sides can be. What brutes they can be too, day after day, as they track and trick each other, as they make and need each other. Ross Gibson's poignant rewriting of a found dossier of police records has some Dickens, some Dostoevsky, and some DeLillo threaded through it. The sharp local language of Christina Stead, Kenneth Slessor, Arthur Stace and Ruth Park resounds in here too.

'Ross Gibson's poetry is marked by the numinous, then undercut by the quotidian, the earthy, a different way of seeing.' - Jen Webb, Australian Book Review