Secret Third Thing (signed)
Secret Third Thing (signed)
🪲 Secret Third Thing won the 2024 Mary Gilmore Award.
💼Secret Third Thing won the Five Islands Prize.
🪲 Secret Third Thing was named one of the ‘best 25 Australian books of 2023’ by The Guardian.
💼 Individual poems in Secret Third Thing have also won the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, Val Vallis Award, XYZ Prize, Harri Jones Prize, and the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, as well as been shortlisted among others.
🪲 Each book comes signed with a badly-drawn solidarity dolphin with its own hairstyle 🐬
Dan Hogan's Secret Third Thing is a hyper-real comment on this hyper-real moment: it is suffused with internet culture and reflections on the lives we live, now, largely online. What characterises Hogan's poetry is the way that, each time we come close to fully apprehending the impending collapse of capitalism, we are waylaid by something more urgent and mundane. To be non-binary, as these poems show, is not to just be a secret third thing, it is to bring class consciousness to bear upon gender.
‘Above anything else, then, this collection is a work of dialectical materialism. It not only insistently names class struggle, but also highlights its generative potential: the notion that the opposition of the two classes may not be (only) destructive, but lead to the creation of something else: a third, new thing.’
- Eda Gunaydin in the introduction to Secret Third Thing
‘Recurring motifs like late night shopping, food courts, and bin night, form a demotic constellation or stage for the ramblings of Hogan’s poemtagonists. We meet Foiseach, Aduantas, Cluain, and a cast of minor characters, memorably sketched and defiantly scattered throughout the collection. The speaker finds a futile interlocuter in a Centrelink chatbot and, in a recurring sequence consisting of bite-sized chapters, embarks on a Beckettian quest to sell a secondhand suitcase —
We pass many shops, all of them selling various incarnations of
proteins or pianos or self-care products for psychopomps.’
- Judges’ Report, Five Islands Prize
‘It's a sui generis book that is really damn funny, but which even more importantly asks the question: “you think this is funny?”’
- J. Taylor Bell for Australian Book Review
🪲 Read a review of Secret Third Thing for Meanjin.
💼 Read a review of Secret Third Thing for Australian Book Review.
🪲 Read another review of Secret Third Thing for Meanjin.
💼 Read Eda Gunaydin’s introduction to Secret Third Thing.
🪲 Read the preface to Secret Third Thing.
💼 Read an excerpt here, here, and here.
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ISBN: 9780648917649
ISBN-10: 0648917649
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Published: 15th May 2023
Publisher: Cordite Publishing
Country of Publication: AU
Dimensions (cm): 22.2 x 15 x 0.9
Weight (kg): 0.14
