Toby Fitch

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, 2021).

Sydney-based poet and editor Toby Fitch has spent much of the last decade traversing the field of radical French modernist poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire. That engagement ignited Fitch’s imagination. He began inverting, recombining, mistranslating, and mimicking their techniques in his own poetry. In his new collection, Sydney Spleen, he has made a sophisticated, fresh move that enhances his signature playfulness and tongue-in-cheek poetic antics.

'Feeling pneumataphoric, I sublate my              I’ve got over 73

long working days into more              tabs open in my hot

spatially, cognitively              skull right now, one of which ...'

The poetic epigraphs that introduce all three sections in Brink, Jill Jones’s tenth full-length poetry collection, are collaged fragments from the poems proper. Moodily, they skirt the edges of what’s to come: ‘I am to proliferate.’ The poems then, in all their multiplicity, evoke and explore being on the brink – of knowing, feeling ...

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Toby Fitch reads his poem 'In Fancy' which features in the 2016 New South Wales anthology.

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Toby Fitch reads his poem 'Diva Maintenance' which features in the 2016 New South Wales anthology.

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Toby Fitch reads his poem 'Mauvement' which features in the 2016 New South Wales anthology.

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Toby Fitch reads his poem 'Democrazy' which features in the 2016 New South Wales anthology.

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Toby Fitch reads his poem 'Gen Y' which features in the 2016 New South Wales anthology.