handshake & Why Are My Hands Shaking Like This?: Material Ecopoetics, Formplay and the Panic Sublime

This thesis consists of a manuscript of poems and photography: handshake, and its accompanying exegesis: Why Are My Hands Shaking Like This?: Material Ecopoetics, Formplay and the Panic Sublime. The manuscript is a multimodal artist's book, combining conceptual photography with lyric poetry, investigating personal and public tensions between environment, desire, isolation and panic. Developed during the devastating East Australian bushfire season of 2019-20 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the work looks at global trends and threats from a place of isolation and personal fear, intertwining the material with the metaphysical. The exegetical component is structured into three chapters which place my manuscript within a broader eco-critical context. The first chapter provides a selected overview of the sublime aesthetic, through Romanticism and into its varying iterations in the twentieth century, before examining Australian poet Jill Jones's The Beautiful Anxiety as a study of the 'material sublime' in the context of contemporary ecopoetics. The second chapter investigates form and representation, particularly fragmentation, as a response to anxiety and derealisation. It examines Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's The Hundreds as a case study in experimentation with genre and form, followed by an analysis of Suzanne Doppelt's collection of surreal and fragmented poetry and photography The Field is Lethal, translated from the French by Cole Swensen. Finally, in the third chapter, the focus is on handshake as I explore thematic and formal concerns and suggest a new conception of the sublime, which I have termed the 'panic sublime'.