Limited Cities - Lachlan Brown - Bog

Limited Cities is a collection of poems which searches for and finds grace in outlying and disadvantaged parts of the city that are often derided or ignored. The primary setting is Sydney's south-western suburbs, with their housing estates and shopping malls and highways, places featured in the media for crime, social tension and corruption. Elsewhere in the collection, these suburban scenes are set against their European counterparts, with rhapsodies on the Parisian banlieues during Advent and Lent, and list-poems set on the streets of Barcelona. Lachlan Brown's poetry draws a self-aware and precarious authenticity from these contested landscapes, using a variety of forms which allows his poems to be personal, political and revelatory by turns.
Lachlan Brown's poems have been published widely in Australian literary journals. He was shortlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize in 2008, and received a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for poetry in the same year. He grew up in Macquarie Fields in the south-west of Sydney, and now teaches literature at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga. Limited Cities is his first collection of poetry.