The other side of happiness is where the hard work's done.
In November 2016, unable to focus on much else outside of her own disbelief and anger with the US presidential election, American-Australian Heather Taylor-Johnson began writing poems in response to outrageous and offensive quotes by the incoming POTUS, and found it a healthy way to settle back into the world around her. With sexism, racism and climate-change denial playing heavily into the far-right zeitgeist of our times, this book - six years on - is still fighting back. But it's true things are better now / It's true that things are the same. Ironic, playful, lamenting, Alternative Hollywood Ending melds the political with the domesticated, and the public with the poet's invisibly disabled body-as-temple: chaos the beauty of our wild lives.
Heather Taylor-Johnson moved from the US to Australia in 1999 to begin a post graduate degree in Creative Writing. She received a PhD from the University of Adelaide and, while doing so, found a husband and had three children. Her first novel was Pursuing Love and Death (HarperCollins 2013) and her second is Jean Harley Was Here (UQP 2017). Her fourth book of poetry is Meanwhile, the Oak (Five Islands Press, 2016). She's been writing reviews of poetry and fiction for various literary magazines for more than a decade and regularly reviews film for InDaily.
Praise for Alternative Hollywood Ending
'A sustained note held against the noisy chords of living as a woman now; a tough memo, a truth-telling, a book that urges our punkish cores to wear your love as a cloak, a skin of your nerves; keep going. Get started.' - Melinda Bufton
'Tells of human endurance, and the daily battle that living is for so many of us, in a humane and thought-provoking way.' - Peter Boyle
