Review: Inferno by Andrew Brooks

It’s the end of summer on Wangal Country and there’s the promise of fire on the wind. “Everyone and everything is about to explode,” writes Andrew Brooks. He reads Dante. His rates as a casual teacher are cut by over a third. He hangs out with his friends and lover, listens to banging tunes, and eats snacks. The world burns, not metaphorically.

Inferno is an account of burning out and burning up. Like the sour-sweetness of the pickled vegetables Brooks is so fond of, this collection is tender and sharp. Arranged as four sequences, each of the untitled poems builds on the previous. In one the poet takes Tamil lessons and is questioned why “when I’m, like, not a real Tamil”. It is followed immediately by a very short poem:

I fucking hate it when structures of domination are confused with structures of belonging.

This is a descent into the hell of capitalism in the 21st century, the apotheosis of centuries of imperialism and racism. In the first sequence, Hell Pup, the poet identifies with Cerberus, “nameless outcast, a mixed-breed, a bitsa”, and reads the tale as a revenge fantasy: Cerberus is the tormenter of the third circle, where the gluttonous are punished. Hell is other people, says Sartre, or as Brooks quotes Italo Calvino:

the inferno … is what is already here … that we form by being together

While hellfire surrounds the city (it’s unclear exactly when the collection is set, but it certainly feels like the 2019-20 Black Summer, Australia’s worst bushfire season on record), the grind of exploitation continues. “Supervision”, Brooks notes, “is the technique of ‘sweating’ labour”. He waits for emails from HR, endures meaningless euphemisms like “greater transparency”, fills in “forms and prepare[s] responses to a series of questions noone will read”. “Each day we wake more exhausted to sell our labour in order to endure our lives,” he writes:

each day we wake still inside a history of taking; each day we wake to the uneven distribution of death; each day we wake to the fires still raging; each day we wake under the sign of the commodity; each day we wake to the rule of Law.

At a union committee meeting they only have an hour to make a resolution and the motion isn’t binding. “We will have to ask our bosses if we want to go on strike,” Brooks concludes. There are “institutional cupcakes with edible logos” and there is the inevitable fruit platter (“some rockmelon and halved strawberries, grapes, a few orange wedges, honeydew”).

That observation of office catering is very funny but also abjectly reflects the bureaucratic perversion of nourishment. It stands in stark contrast to Brooks’ attention to food elsewhere: wine and cheese shared with friends, tahini and banana on toast for breakfast, cabbage prepared for preserving:

I wring the excess liquid from the leaves and lick the salty brine from my fingers, coat the cabbage in a mixture of garlic (lots), ginger, gochugaru (also lots), white miso and pack it down with weights. A few days later it starts to bubble and ferment.

Salt, Brooks quotes American poet Diane di Prima, is “health and energy / healing too”. Food, friends, music (Inferno starts and ends with Mariah Carey), a lover — Brooks lingers tenderly over these details, a counter-narrative to the inferno. In a highlight of the collection, he lists like Maria in The Sound Of Music the things that give him fire:

… Frank Ocean’s scream at the end of ‘Bad Religion’, strong pickles, a cop car burning, a big pot of dal (enough to feed everyone), picking herbs from the garden, reading something great when I should be asleep, cooking for everyone I love …

For Brooks, these moments aren’t just respite or pause or “self-care” that enable further productivity, they are the place where something more generative might grow, “the magic of this slippage” where “I” becomes “We”. The passage from Calvino, sent to him by a friend, continues that we must “learn to recognise who and what … are not inferno [and] give them space”. Hell is a matter of perspective. We might be in it, but the trick is to find a little room, and then make it as big as possible. Serve it with a side of pickles.

Gay rating: 3/5 for amyl, lovers, divas, and vibes.