Publisher's Synopsis
No Freedom Too Total is the second poetry collection by Western Australian poet Liam Blackford and a Proverse Prize 2023 finalist entry. Each of the poems in the collection has six stanzas, each stanza with six lines, and each line with six syllables. Poems in this form have been described as '666 poems', 'hexagrammatical poems', or 'two-dimensional verbal cubes'. The overarching concern of the collection is the fundamental darkness of our civilisation: that we do not know what we are doing, that there are far fewer limits than we imagined, and that we are constantly on the precipice of chaos, war, and extinction. The central avatar in the collection is the human; some of which are women, some of which are men, some of which are angels, and some of which are animals. The human is an increasingly lonely individual in an increasingly desolate world, unable to communicate with others and with no community or family. Adult humans are no more adept than their child counterparts, each yearning for comfort but mired in confusion. These human avatars are scattered across landscapes of menacing psychedelia, in which men are caged in oceanside caves, exiled women find crystal pools in rainforest mist, and a mysterious frequency causes people to drop dead. Humans scramble over pellets on the gravel, bathe in filthy streams, and beg for each other's love as their bodies immolate. Corporations speak to each other with human voices, and prayers are given to a transcendent godhead that takes the form of a network. Six of the poems are 'dreams from the chamber', erotic tapestries from brothels, bathhouses and dungeons, sexual battlefields filled with tenderness and bitterness, desire and brutality. Therein, escorts and patrons converse from disparate physical locations, taking part in an economy of human sexuality stuck in patterns of transaction and repetition. Six of the poems take place in 'the transcendent region', a realm of balletic motion and suspense beyond the pettiness of the human world, in which there are souls, perceptions and voices, but no humans to which they belong. Despite the collection's fixations with contemporary technology and modern human identity, it has a Romantic spirit. It might have been written in nineteenth century London, but instead was written in early twenty-first century Hong Kong in an era of epochal political and cultural change.
