#15: Reviewing The Exclusion Zone

UQP published The Exclusion Zone last year, and yes I’m only reviewing it now because Shastra is tragically leaving Australia for the United States and performing in January before she goes. But I would also argue its themes have only snowballed in relevance since its publication.

This is a choose-your-own-adventure poetry collection set in an apocalyptic hellscape. Which is certainly a string of words. When it first came out, Shastra appeared at a Brisbane Writers Festival event where she gave some insight as to how she can write poetry into an overall story, let alone many overall storylines with alternate endings. 

“I’m a fiction writer,” she said at the time. 

“When I discovered poetry, I thought, ‘Oh, I can write short fiction, but even shorter?’”

This attitude towards the form shines in The Exclusion Zone. ‘Aubade’ tells the story of a boy starving. ‘Transcript of a Fight Scene’ is, in fact, a fight scene. But it’s not really prose fiction, that it’s all referring to.

Also in that conversation, Shastra assured the audience there was no ‘right way’ to read the book. If you want to read it front to back and ignore the prompts, nothing is stopping you, and you should still have a good experience (a relief to me, a completionist worried about missing out on certain poems should I follow a certain path). She said she wanted it to feel like an open-world video game.

This is front-and-centre in The Exclusion Zone, which has a section called ‘The Game Room’ and poems which use controller symbols, language like ‘walkthrough’, structures like flow-charts. Although it doesn’t rely on specific game references, it’s heavily mired in the culture of gaming.

When we add that to the full-on sentence from earlier, the genre-mash up seems overwhelming. But from its first page, The Exclusion Zone blends these elements together to create the feeling of being inside the best eerie dystopian RPG. Think: if you could have all the Death Stranding vibes and none of the annoyance of actually playing the game.

These are not the relevant-to-2024 themes I was referencing earlier, though. I personally would love to see a suddenly ballooning market for gamer-culture choose-your-own-adventure apocalyptic poetry collections, but The Exclusion Zone remains unique. I was talking about why there’s an apocalypse.

The last line from Shastra’s Brisbane Writers Festival chat I’ll recall is an insistence that the poems in this collection are fictional, that she did not recount her own life events and experiences for this book but rather imagined a story where these poems would live.

But the story is rooted in reality. 

While some of it only hints vaguely at a collapse of humanity (like in ‘How Deep’) and some suggests a far-future setting (like ‘Aubade’), many of the poems in this collection directly comment on modern historical events (‘Fukushima Soil’, ‘Things We Inscribed In The Voyager Golden Record’, ‘Undertakers Of The Atom’). Some appear to describe contemporary moments (‘Fishing at Caer a’Muirehen’, ‘Learning A Dead Language’, ‘Shastra Deo’). Even these create a sense of an ending.

The inclusion of modern history, contemporary scenery, near-future, indescribable collapse and far-future poetry implies a real opinion if it doesn’t actually tell it to you. When we face seemingly endlessly increasing disaster, tragedy, conflict, death, the core of this collection becomes less and less fictional: We are in the prequel of the apocalypse. We are searching for something. We are waiting for someone to answer. Sometimes there is not a choice. Where will we turn next?

Word Count: 653