Year of the Metal Rabbit

Often drawing on the natural world for subject matter and imagery, Tammy Armstrong’s Year of the Metal Rabbit gives slip to snares set by lyric and narrative conventions and bolts for the edges of what poetry can say. Like a long brooding walk into the heart of a stormy night, the thing-filled landscape of Armstrong’s poems is beguilingly kinetic, alive with shadows and chaos, a dreamscape where encounters with flora, fauna, and neighbours prompt uncertainty more often than identification, where ‘we happen in the gaps / in the stranger places.’