Regulator

<p>Dodds examines the real Australia where the small flat human incident might disappear in such monstrous immensity where aliens might choose to pass by-a naturally surreal world. This is a place to band together or be sucked into nightmare and float out into awful space a place where only the intimacy of human contact keeps us grounded. This is poetry that reads like a novel the characters alive and waving to us from the page. -Rhyll McMaster</p><p></p><p>The poems in <em>Regulator </em>reveal an observant eye and an acute ear; the language is evocative precise and sensuous. There are poems of the natural world bristling with death and transformation and of the everyday/dangerous laboratory. In Benjamin Dodds's childhood Australia the Virgin Mary painted in All Weather Exterior blue fades in the Riverina sun; 'dangerously adolescent men/in wet sucking board-shorts' bomb into the irrigation canal; a sweat-stained rural Santa hands out packs of Twisties. Under the surface the insistent pulse of sexuality an undertow of dread a glint of subtle menace. -Tricia Dearborn</p>