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Or: An Autobiography
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‘Haunted thick and variously’, Or: An Autobiography stages a non-binary, verbicovisual encounter with Virginia Woolf’s modernist ‘biography’, Orlando and its kin, in the form of a collaged and shaped assemblage, a ghostly bag of ‘queer tricks’. Arranged in chapters with bifurcated pages, Or makes its own place in the tide of ‘documents, both private and historical’, as Woolf had it, with fluency, invention, candour and verve. Experimental sonnet sequence above, auto-biblio-biographical essay below, each a fragmentary, bookish constellation of green, gender, sex, submission, love, wind, water, flowers, trees and centaurs, complete with addended textual apparatus. Or takes Toby Fitch’s evolving work in visual and citational poetics in a new direction that is self-reflexive, scholarly, intimate and touching.
–Kate Lilley
Or: An Autobiography is a pleasure to read and reread, with an ebb and flow that’s cyclical, amorphous and gloriously ambiguous. Or resurrects and honours Orlando with playful care and genderfuckery, while revealing and refracting the work back on itself. This is a book of multitudes, resisting resolution and posing as many questions as it answers.
–Rae White
Toby Fitch in Or: An Autobiography offers us a virtuosic reshaping grammar, an or-ness, that challenges the stereotyping of his/their/our bodies, their genders and physical forms, their phases and exchanges. This is a brave work, vulnerable and ambitious, intimate yet expansive, lucid, satiric and frisky, as it shapeshifts across the page, making short shrift of expected poetic and gender modalities: poem/prose, line/sentence, collage/memoir, top/bottom, either/or/both? It’s ‘a wild experiment’, embracing language’s transformative power, its enthusiasms, its wardrobe of trickery, its incongruities and revelations, its erotics and its tenderness.
–Jill Jones
Or: An Autobiography
About the Book:
Or: An Autobiography explores fluidities of self, body, and imagination. Its central long poem, ‘The Or Tree’, is a speculative version of the fictitious poem ‘The Oak Tree’, by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. ‘The Oak Tree’ takes Orlando over 300 years to write, in which time they live through multiple eras, burn their poetic oeuvre, have various affairs with poets, critics, and a queen, and change gender from man to woman. ‘The Or Tree’ is an assemblage poem, resurrected chronologically from fragments of the six chapters of a burnt copy of Orlando: A Biography. It is an homage to androgyny and the non-binary, or rather, an expression of the fluidity we are all capable of. ‘Or’ is an alter ego and character in the poem (pronouns they/them), as well as a conjunction, and a ghost. ‘The Or Tree’ is complemented by an ‘understorey’, a poetic essay that underscores and intertwines with the poem across each chapter in a radical play on the autobiographical and citational.
About the Author:
Born in London and raised on unceded Gadigal land, Toby Fitch (he/they) is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, former poetry editor of Overland, and the author of nine books of poetry, including Sydney Spleen (2021) and Object Permanence: Calligrammes (2022). Toby’s poetry has won the Grace Leven Prize, the Charles Rischbieth Jury Prize and the Leonie Kramer Award, and his work as an editor includes the anthologies Best of Australian Poems 2021 (with Ellen van Neerven) and Groundswell. Toby lives in Sydney’s inner west with his partner and their three children.
ISBN:978-1-7642397-0-7