Cotton-stuffed

‘tulip lips and birdhouse chests. broken alarm clocks and lipstick-stained slot machines. butter. goggles. candles. a garland made of raisins. she drinks cherries and grows weeds and mistakes her garden bed for a dustpan. she is old western and new hollywood and an answering machine you can’t stop calling.’

Our protagonist lives beneath the gaze of a tapestry in the home of her bell-tongued grandmother. Even in its absence, the gaze of the tapestry follows her – as her family migrate from Peru to Australia and begins to splinter apart, as she grasps to a tentative place on monkey bars and in office cubicles, as she learns to wax her body and to morph herself for ideas of love – until something changes her vision of all that is beautiful.

From award-winning poet Arantza García Ferrand, Cotton-stuffed is a collaged collection of idioms and ephemera and conversations with succulents. It is a questioning of archives and who is allowed into them. And mostly, it is a coming-of-age love letter to queer relationships, migrant families and anyone feeling the tugs and shifts of identity.

A captivating, lyrical meditation on family, migration, identity and home – from a sharp and ambitious new voice in Australian writing. The glorious creative abandon with which Garcia Ferrand approaches form, structure and sentence will surely render this stunning debut a contemporary Australian classic. Maxine Beneba Clarke