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.
‘Channelling the subconscious of the post-industrial city, Newcastle Sonnets reads like poetic Pop-Rocks, its moments and insights condensed into flares and crackles.’ —Vanessa Berry
'Hip, suave, pert, pinpointing, and penetrating, these poems engage with locale in most enterprising ways.' — Judith Beveridge, Australian Book Review — Books of the Year 2018
