Damien Becker, Thin Reed Throat (Flying Island Poets 2026)
This book won the 2024 Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets. It makes me happy that the prize exists as a means to getting such a beautiful work into print.
According to the ‘About the author’ note, Damien Becker’s poetry ‘draws on a lifetime of chronic illness, living with cystic fibrosis, and as a double lung transplant recipient’. The book isn’t anything like a novel in verse, but the poems are arranged to form a kind of narrative, so that the reader is invited into the world of children living with cystic fibrosis, where they attend the funerals of friends and are prepared for an early death themselves; into the social experience of living with cystic fibrosis as an adult; into hospital life; and in a wrenching series, into the story of a double lung transplant and its aftermath.
After my first read of the book, I looked up a cystic fibrosis website where I read a number of ‘transplant stories’. They tend to focus on the practicalities – how soon or late to apply for a transplant, how to prepare, what to expect physically and emotionally. They talk of the before–after difference and have a recurring theme of gratitude. What Damien Becker does is make rich, profoundly moving poetry about the experience. One of the book’s last poems ‘A Letter, Delivered on the Sydney Opera House Stage’, begins, ‘Dear daughter of my organ donor.’ He did indeed perform a version of it at the Australian Poetry Slam National Final at the Sydney Opera House in 2019:
If you’ve watched the video, you’ll agree that the last line – ‘The voice that will fill the air will be strong, and will be mine’ – works powerfully in a spoken-word poem, where the voice it names is the slightly laboured, vulnerable voice that we hear. It works just as powerfully on the page, where previous poems have made shown us the difficulty of breathing with lungs that desperately need replacing.
This is a book of poetry that opens doors in the mind and heart.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.
Me fail? I fly! 