A Sonogrammar

**Shortlisted, NSW Literary Awards 2026, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry**

A sonogrammar is a mythic technology and the name for the object it makes. It is both method of listening for auditory system in a work and it is the figuration of findings: rhythmic pattern, correspondence, dissonance.

The poems in this collection conduct a systematic sonogrammar on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914), reading this exquisite and perplexing modernist text as meaningful first and foremost at the level of sound. The collection de-forms and re-articulates the sound of writing to learn what Stein still teaches about the interdepending work of intonation, punctuation and grammar in the creation of rhythm.

Because rhythm interlaces a writer with a locality materially, at the level of wave and vibration A Sonogrammar is also testament to the way poetry can work (as light and colour work) to construct a timespace. It is an ode to Stein's capacity to undiscipline sentences, building syntactic room inside them for divergence and differentiation.