By Paris Rosemont
From a launch speech delivered at Addi Road Writers’ Festival 16 May 2026
Thin Reed Throat
by Damien Becker
Flying Island Books
Pocket Poet Series
ISBN: 9781763678187, 84 pages, Jan 2026, paperback
It’s rare that I dive into a poetry collection with absolutely no preconceptions whatsoever. But this was the case when I read Damien Becker’s collection, Thin Reed Throat. Damien and I met online last year through the Flying Islands Poetry Manuscript Workshops that ran monthly via Zoom. I appreciated Damien’s insightful reflections, so when his book – which won the 2024 Flying Islands Manuscript Prize – finally became a tangible thing and he asked me to launch it for him at this festival today, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
To say that I was unprepared for what I would find within the pages of this pocketbook is an understatement. I had never read anything quite like it before. It was startling, raw, confronting, and gut wrenching. I was knocked for six. Thin Reed Throat was a revelation. This is the kind of poetry I want to read more of – as much for the craftsmanship as for its voice and what it has to say. This isn’t about simply ticking a ‘marginalised voices’ box. The subject matter is important; vital, even. And it’s something I feel privileged to have been given a glimpse of, difficult though the material often was. It was
illuminating. The lived experience was so outside my own, but it managed to tap into a frequency rich with resonance—that of our shared humanity: our vulnerability, suffering, and hearts.
Thin Reed Throat had me intrigued right from the title of its substantive opening poem: “Voted By His Peers Most Likely Both to Succeed and to Die Young”. Had I any inkling of Damien’s lifelong struggles—of what I, as a reader, might have been in for—I may have been able to brace myself for the sledgehammer. Though I’m not entirely sure that pre-empting being pulverised actually softens the blow. As it was, I was plunged cold turkey into the world of ‘white coats round the bed / like ringworm’, salt corroding cells, blood spores, and phlegm—so much phlegm! More phlegm than I could have
ever envisaged I’d be reading about in a poetry collection. This book is not for the faint of heart.
The next poem found an even more tender place to wound; its title and images haunting me long after. “Five Child Funerals”. Where does one even begin with subject-matter as heavy as that? Well, in Damien’s case, four times
out of five, the answer was wry humour. It provided the perfect counterbalance. To illustrate this, I’m going to share the first line from each of the five stanzas:
One. Wonder why, if she wasn’t religious, her mum had insisted on a
church service.
Two. Nothing funnier than terminally ill kids.
Three. Video montage to The Bangles.
Four. Funerals happen without enough notice.
Five. [And bear in mind this is the one out of the five that skipped the humour
and went straight to the gut-punch] There are baby-sized coffins, which nobody knows until we do, grief
like the bones collapsed, like the sky was eaten, memory book one photo long.
Suffice to say, Damien does not shy away from difficult topics. But what I appreciated was that he doesn’t get cloying or guilt-trippy about the relentlessness of living with a chronic condition, the suffering, the endurance, or the witnessing of his friends suffering too. He lets the imagery do the heavy lifting. And it’s the very simplicity of statement, the lack of adornment in the stark truth, that hits even harder.
Before I get too carried away waxing lyrical about the power of the content of these poems, I wanted to highlight the phenomenal craft that has gone into them. Thin Reed Throat is a smorgasbord of poetic technique. From sparse couplets to dense prose poems, and a burning haibun giving way to chunks of blackout before the distillation of a revelatory haiku landing on the other side of erasure, this collection is a feast of form and invention. There are interesting layouts, concrete poems that shape and funnel, non-linear use of punctuation marks to create patterns and visual impact, list poems, words strung together, melding and morphing. Malleable too is the striking imagery. Take this, for example, from a poem titled Best Not (To Be Sick):
Over time, I get used to feeling the tickle
of blood bubbling inside my lungs
like the last draw on a milkshake.
Or this, from Ward Rounds:
Why only on waking? When bruised eyes crawl with fruit flies? When
all I can think of is the shrinking diameter of my wrists and why doctors
insist on wearing stethoscopes round their necks like big swinging
pendulum dicks?
Next time you’re at a hospital, I challenge you to try to get that image out of your head!
Thin Reed Throat is an astonishing debut: a visceral, tender, powerful poetry collection.
About Paris: Paris Rosemont is a Thai Australian poet and author of Banana Girl, Barefoot Poetess, and >>glitch<<. Winner of the Matthew Rocca Poetry Prize 2025, longlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize 2026, and nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, Paris’s writing appears in a plethora of literary journals and anthologies worldwide. Paris is a critic for Mascara Literary Review and Guest Editor for Written Off Literary Journal. She is currently working on her debut novel exploring diaspora, desire, and cultural inheritance. Find her at www.parisrosemont.com