Jake Goetz’s second poetry collection, Unplanned Encounters: Poems 2015–2020, presents a personal poetic ecology that revels in the intimacies of the everyday. Broken into three parts, the first section, ‘Ash in Sydney’, wades through the smoked-out cityscape of Sydney during the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfire season: an environmental disaster that led to the estimated death of one billion animals. Interrogating humanity’s implication in these fires, the poet reflects on the cataclysmic event as but another chapter in the ecocidal narrative of Australia’s colonial-capitalist project. The second section, ‘The Cobalt Blues’, presents a series of New York School-esque works written while the poet lived and worked in Sydney and Brisbane (2016-18). Scrolling through urban places and online spaces, these poems critique the métro-boulot-dodo of daily life in a world where the swipe of a finger can reveal children working ‘12-hour days / in Congolese mines / to provide the cobalt / for phone batteries’ (‘The cobalt blues’). The last section, ‘Unplanned Encounters’, compiles a selection of poems written in 2015 into a fragmented travelogue: taking the reader through an array of locales and subjects, from a rumination on love by the Pearl River in Guangzhou, China, to a jetlagged morning at LA’s Venice Beach; from savouring a snowy night in Vienna, to a reflection on the history of coca in La Paz, Bolivia. A celebration of backpacking bohemianism yet also a criticism of this very privilege, these works trace a young poet coming to terms with the poetics and politics of a planetary home. 

Endorsements

The feather that causes an earthquake is a figure of speech only too descriptive of today’s planet of pandemics and climate change. The state of nature Jake Goetz registers is closer to Thomas Hobbes than to the New Age. It’s a world where the nominally civilized trade blows over toilet paper in supermarkets and where hedonism becomes head-on-ism. The place for beauty in all this is difficult yet still possible in the shape poems might give to the heterogenous mess of happenstance and disaster. The hope of poetry is that things should last, not least the medium itself. Jake Goetz’s poetry works as an ecological practice, like slow-cooking in a fast world. —-Laurie Duggan

Jake Goetz has a line in his opening poem, ‘you don't cry anymore’. It anticipates an interwoven tally of injustice and loss due to climate change and capitalism. These human-made calamities are conveyed via dark, droll ironies. Packed up and waiting to evacuate from an encroaching wildfire, the poet and his companions watch a tv program on the plight of arctic polar bears. Quoting Julio Cortázar, ‘I'm looking for a poetic ecology, to observe myself and at times recognise myself in different worlds’, Goetz performs this quest smoothly. Using a mode of incantatory streams he conjures a personal botanical metonymy and traverses colonised yet surviving lands in diverse locations. He pays elegiac tribute to various influences including August Kleinzahler and John Forbes and writes a poignant lament for Kurt Cobain. Jake Goetz has a savvy knack for potent imagery, slightly warped observation and satirical takes on everyday situations. In an era when ‘technology tells our jokes’ Unplanned Encounters offers us a set of versatile poems that are full of heart and artistry. —-Pam Brown

About the author

Jake Goetz grew up on Dharawal Country in southern Sydney. His poetry and writing have appeared in numerous places, including Overland, Rabbit, Best Australian Poems 2021, TEXT, Island, Southerly, Cordite, Plumwood Mountain, Past Simple (US), Minarets (NZ), and The Sun Herald. He has published one book, meditations with passing water (Rabbit Poets Series, 2018), a long poem about the Maiwar (Brisbane River), which was shortlisted for the QLD Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in 2019. Between 2017 and 2020, he edited the small, intermittent online journal, Marrickville Pause. He is currently completing a PhD in Writing at the Writing & Society Research Centre (Western Sydney University) and is the Reviews Editor at Plumwood Mountain.