The Drop Off

Exploring the liminal space of shared custody and societal tropes of the 'broken family', this collection is the follow-up to Stavanger's award-winning Case Notes. A blend of poetry, found text, short-form prose, reportage, and longer poetic non-fiction, this work unravels the day-to-day reality of co-parenting amid growing environmental and class concerns, and the ways we stay afloat.

Stavanger's lyric is both elastic and electric - there's no limit to where his lines extend, and the snap back is charged with enough volts to restart any heart. Omar Sakr

David Stavanger writes poems of excruciating beauty, associative insight and acute humanity like no-one else I know. From the complexities of shared parenting to the housing crisis, from the corporatisation of everyday life to the alienations of the medical system, The Drop Off lands in the reader's body with devastating and revelatory effect. Andy Jackson

The Drop Off raises crucial questions about how and why we are blindly complicit in diminishing our lives in ways that threaten to undermine our capacity to value the very qualities that characterise us as human. Amid the heartbreak and melancholy, the unsettled and unsettling, there is much humour, too. These poems are extraordinary animals. Stavanger has an astute and unflinching eye - and a talent for matter-of-factly corralling mundane everyday details to absurd effect. Grace Yee