Zoetrope by Hilary Otto

Zoetrope by Hilary Otto

Progress spinning ahead of us

but just out of reach

Why do we struggle to move forward, to accept change? Zoetrope is a journey through the circles we trace, the detours and the repetitive movements we find safety in. The pamphlet explores how fear and an unwillingness to examine our own behaviour or to question those in power combine to hold us back. The poems examine themes as varied as sexual violence, the legacy of colonialism and the growing influence of technology on our lives. Zoetrope plots our attempts to make progress and our failures as snapshots on a spinning cylinder, and then portrays us breaking out in search of hope.

It is a stirring experience to read Zoetrope. Each turn of the page brings something new and unexpected. Otto's lens on the world reveals both the sinister and the sublime, in poems overflowing with wit and imagination.

Emily Dickinson would love the work of Hilary Otto - an exciting emerging poet who fulfils Dickinson's directive to 'tell the truth but tell it slant'. Never prosaic or obvious, Hilary Otto's collection of startlingly original, inventive, visionary poems is informed by a quick wit, social and political consciousness and a lively, and far-reaching intelligence. Hilary is a master of dazzling and affecting imagery and speaks her truth with eloquence, insight and encyclopaedic knowledge of a wide variety of subjects. She is equally adept when writing about the arts as the sciences. A must-read by an exciting contemporary poet.

The speakers in Hilary Otto's bold and unsettling debut pamphlet spin toward and away from the reader with the unnerving brilliance of hallucinations. Here are human voices trapped in patterns inflicted on them by the powerful voices terrified but 'capable / of extraordinary things'. Otto's thrilling phrase-making generates intensity and momentum, the reader pulled through a labyrinth of dark corridors lit by metaphor, the overall effect a hymn to the relentless power of imagination: 'The more we mustn't be, / the more we become.'