A Mending Piece

A Mending Piece is a vibrant movement, pulsating in all directions. Both raw and tender, sharp and soft, it seems to expand at its edges and spill fresh life into the swell it creates. There are rhythms of loss and love here, bodies with urgent feelers out amid rock, petal, antennae, algae blooming; the hum and growl of our 'belly ache interior.' 

- Dr Sarah Kelly

From the slow collapse of one relationship to the fresh tendrils of new love, Camilla Nelson's A Mending Piece nimbly weaves together its own relational ecology of unravelling. Mulchy quick shimmering grammar enacts the falling together (or coming apart) of joy, loss, frustration, rage, the receiving of pleasure and the impossibility of repair. Nelson's writing teeters with broken brilliance across the abyssal limits of language and the everyday madness of never quite knowing another (lover / lichen / forest / rain) even as you lie together with your limbs entwined and all these edges fraying still. "Decay," writes Nelson, 'is epic.' 

- Tom Jeffreys

I did not know the parts of myself I had buried nor ask that my grief should return. Grief and love do not stay where we leave them. They move, across time, across memory, in the rawness of landscapes - in the fierceness and tenderness of changing seasons. In the interruptions. How do we hold space for what cannot be named? How do we contain the hollow carved by absence or the sudden rupture of love? These poems trace the attentive work of giving shape to feeling - of holding it, listening to it, and allowing it, piece by piece, to be known.

- Linus Slug - Mendoza - Peeps