Author(s): Cassandra Atherton

Australian Fiction

Trace is Cassandra’s second book of prose poetry.  Her prose poems reference a kind of Nabokovian aesthetic where clues are scattered throughout the book and the reader is encouraged to unearth the intertexts and references in a literary game.  Stitching these clues together is like constructing a Frankensteinean monster from body parts stolen from a charnel house.  Trace reanimates canonical texts and raises the spectres of a series of canonical authors and characters to demonstrate the way in which classic texts transcend time.  It plays with the way  ‘classics’ are part of popular consciousness and are mythologised in ways that may not always be truly representative of fact or reality.  Classics leave a trace.  This book is about those trace elements.