There’s no escaping adjacency to the boys as an institution (so invulnerable! so fragile!) but are the boys themselves our enemies? Can they be lovers, even comrades? In this beautiful and playful book fred spoliar unravels worlds of gender and work to tease a poetry of pain and joy from the smouldering present.
Praise for With the Boys
By turns outraged and outrageous, dismissed and dismissive, hilarious and smouldering, fred spoliar’s With the Boys survives the boys and offers a palette for how we might do the same, embedded as we are with the boys inevitably, desperate as we are to try and be beyond them. I love this book.
— Brandon Brown
Breaking the perspex with the boys, fred’s poems are a citational undoing of the ceaseless materialisations of labour, gender, weather that accumulate on the exhausted lyric body. In their place, they offer us another berth; a natural history after nature. They counterwrite for the pluriform conditions of livable worlds. Aleatory without cruelty; flourishing without curtailment.
— Fred Carter
In this sly, inviting, complex love poem, fred spoliar captures the absurdity of being a subject, then seems to melt ‘the boys’ with a laser, concept and matter at once. Plays on sound and association turn a world of service work and buzz cuts inside out, reaching for another one, imperceptible and thrilling. Capital is an orchestra, a 'madding in me,' always both here and elsewhere, suffocating but ultimately weak. So 'where E is in fact shit,' it really is, because E, like everything else in this beautiful work, is not rendered sacred but historical and changeable. Dare to do more than dream!
— Amy De’Ath