Cadaver Dog
by Luke Best

This stunning and powerful verse novel was the winner of the 2019 Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry

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Overview

When an inland tsunami floods the foothills of a mountain city, a woman survives the inundation of her home, alone. This edgy, potent verse novel circles the scene like the cadaver dog whose work it is to search for those who are missing. Reimagining traditions of bush gothic and outback horror, Luke Best crafts a terrifying and acute psychological portrait of grief and guilt. Loss, cowardice and trauma pulse through this singular and uncompromising narrative of ecological and personal disaster.

Details

Awards

Reviews

ebook

Joel Deane

‘Energetic, demotic, poetic: Luke Best writes like no one else. His debut collection reminds me of the sweep of Luke Davies’ Totem, the existential struggle of Henry Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’, and the rough majesty of Les Murray‘s vernacular republic. Cadaver Dog is landmark poetry for – and of – our ecological catastrophe.’

Chloe Wilson

‘Cadaver Dog asks difficult questions about who we become in the worst of circumstances. In language at once lush and brutal, Luke Best explores dread and hope with a steady, unflinching gaze. An urgent book for the strange times we live in.’

Judges’ comments, Thomas Shapcott Prize

‘A terse, powerful verse novel drawing on and re-imagining traditions of bush gothic and outback horror […] The personal, the ecological and the pathological combine in a narrative made up of poems that are devastating, soulful, uncompromising and singular.’

Rohan Wilson

‘Cadaver Dog is exceedingly powerful. Luke Best brings together a collection of tragic characters and sets them at odds with each other. He narrates the catastrophic disintegration of their lives with musical discipline. It reads like a 21st-century renovation of Banjo Paterson’s balladry. A rare achievement.’

Luke Best

Luke Best was born in Toowoomba, where he lives and works. His poetry has been published in literary journals including Overland, Verity La, Stilts Journal, Concrescence, Mascara Literary Review and Tincture Journal. His manuscript Percussion was Highly Commended in the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Prize. Cadaver Dog is Luke’s first book and won the 2019 Thomas Shapcott Prize.