Gutless Wonder

Available now in the Queensland Poetry Chapbook series, 2023

Gutless Wonder is Sean West's debut chapbook, now available in the maiden QP Chapbook Series. This poetry title extends from a larger collection that was Highly Commended in the 2022 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.

Last year, the judges commented that Sean's work is "...thrillingly alive with the pleasures of poetic language and formal experiment." In this tightened collection, Sean continues to explore his grandfather's disappearance at sea in the Moreton Bay region in 1980 when his mother was sixteen. Another recurring subject in this chapbook is toxic masculinity, as Sean's male characters frequently clash, show-boat, and bruise.

This concise, potent display of fifteen poems asks us how do we mourn someone we've never met?

How do we reconcile our familial identity when we share a name with that missing person?

How do we process intergenerational trauma and come out the other side different, better people? 

As he yelled to hold the yellow herring 

high for a photo, I knew I could not 

touch something I had killed.

I wouldn't know what to keep or chuck.

I want to throw some of it back.

I want to throw all of her back.

This chapbook is teeming with so many questions and so few answers. It'll make your head dizzy and your chest ache. Take a breath. Go under.