Thinking with things : object habitats and relational aesthetics in the poetry of Astrid Lorange and Pam Brown

The word 'habitat' is associated most often with living matter. Habitats are places of linkage; environments that sustain, and are built by, living things. But what happens when we imagine poems as habitats for and , whether sentient or not? Contemporary Australian poets Astrid Lorange and Pam Brown both write thing-ly poetries. Both display an intense and tender regard for nouns as they verb. Both revel in arrays of lists. In Astrid Lorange's supercharged works, objects and bodies impress upon and are arranged alongside others in teeming ecologies. Material and conceptual transformations occur as poems enable what literary and cultural theorist John Frow has called "an endless mixing of the properties of persons with the properties of things" (Frow 280)" as figured in Lorange's poem 'Wolves are Swarms'.