“Sinister assassins, ghoulish Specters, and feisty witches make this a rousing read.” Kirkus

Alison Croggon conjures a rich, immersive world with brilliant and memorable characters in this captivating story of loyalty, courage and friendship. Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions - and what we have to gain by confronting them.Īn atmospheric and riveting fantasy adventure, perfect for fans of Frances Hardinge and Cornelia Funke. It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.’įrom award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters. A structure that shaped me, that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I was born as part of a monstrous structure - the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination … grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible… ‘This figure I see in the foreground, this me. “A marvel of a book” – Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars ‘Croggon’s poems offer something intense, difficult and fragile, but simultaneously intimate and hugely rewarding in the reading.’ ‘Alison Croggon’s new translation of the Elegies has a directness, immediacy, sensuality, and violence that distinguishes her from precursors like J.B. Croggon lives in the wild beauty of these Elegies and makes them glow in translation… This is an incendiary work. ‘The poems are not “about” life: rather, they are a startling mimesis of its instability and transience.’Īlison Croggon’s transformative and impassioned translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies attempts the extraordinary… Signature, regret, pain, trauma, wonder, euphoria, wonder, rapture and an immersion in the senses are all contained in the crispness and experiential sensibility that guides her relationship with the original poems.

‘The turbulent currents that make the Elegies so enthralling are generated by the dynamic contradictions of a mind acutely conscious of its own movements,’ she writes in her afterword. Shortlisted for the NSW Premiers Awards Translation Prize 2023Īlison Croggon’s revelatory new translation captures the energies of Rilke’s poems with an urgent, acute clarity. Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alison Croggon

Duino elegies