Shastra Deo's The Agonist

The winner of the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Shastra Deo’s The Agonist provides an idiosyncratic mixture of poems that revolve around the human body. Drawing inspiration from the famous nineteenth-century medical text Gray’s Anatomy, Deo meditates upon the body’s interior life — one that in many ways is a secret world unto itself. There is a perpetual tension going on in The Agonist involving the collision of actions and feelings, bodies and objects. Faithful to the etymology of ‘agony’, there is much conflict in Deo’s poetry, and it is pleasing that she provides no reconciliation for an existence that is often irreconcilable.