Moon Wrasse and the Seahorse

Stories from marine worlds, mythology, transformation, and kinship intersect in this one-off poetry reading event in the immersive aquatic environment of Mikala Dwyer's exhibition, Penelope and the Seahorse. 

Willo Drummond will read a selection of poems from her recently released book, Moon Wrasse, which explores transformations of all kinds. The title poem, Moon Wrasse draws inspiration from the Moon Wrasse fish (Thalassoma lunare), a protogynous hermaphrodite, identified as female at birth and changing to male over a period of 10 days. Other poems encompass transformative processes of identity, grief, creativity, and nature. Reviewer Quinn Eades writes of her work: ‘Willo Drummond gifts us queer and trans bodies, lives, and ecologies. Desire, pain, love and hope play in and through this collection that simultaneously shimmers and cuts’. 

Dr Willo Drummond is a queer poet, researcher and lecturer in creative writing, who lives and writes on Dharug and Gundungurra land. With interests spanning the ecological and cognitive humanities, she writes about creativity, human and non-human animals, gender, disenfranchised grief, and the fragile landscapes of identity. Willo’s poetry can be found in Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, The Canberra Times, anthologies published by Australian Poetry, Hunter Writers Centre, Recent Work Press, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Career Development Grant for poetry from the Australia Council for the Arts (2020), runner-up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize (2021), and shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award (2022). Her book Moon Wrasse was published in March of this year. Willo teaches creative writing at Macquarie University. 

Header image: Tail of the Moon Wrasse fish on a black background. Detail from the cover design by Miranda Douglas for the Moon Wrasse (2023) book by Willo Drummond.