‘Dominic Symes’s songs of love and hate speech is an exploratory ramble through urban life that leaves the poet “dangling on the edge of the tax-free threshold” while constant protest shrinks to background: “here it’s FREE PALESTINE tagged on the skip outside maccas”. From the intensely compressed first poem “passing time” to playful riffs on music, poetry, work, housing, love, ironic observations casually disrupt the immersive surveillance of our era where “you‘ll read the news you’re given”. Symes’s poems lampoon the buffetings of precarity that threaten to jam into permanence. Carousing yet thoughtful, these poems shift their “patchwork quilt of tiny hatreds” into a gleeful celebratory humour that upends the cage of mediated life’s “desire cart” and instagrammed “tattoo that says NOTHING LASTS”.’

—Gig Ryan

Dom Symes lives quietly in naarm/Melbourne. He writes poems, some of which have, over the last few years, been published in Australian journals and anthologies—including Overland, Cordite and Best of Australian Poems. Recent poems were shortlisted for the 2023 David Harold Tribe Award and won the 2023 Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. His debut collection ‘I saw the best memes of my generation’ (Recent Work Press) was highly commended in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards—Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. In 2025 he was shortlisted for the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and in 2026 longlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize.