'Postmodern poetry discovers its classical voice - Her monologues have a fragmentary quality, as if spoken in a post-Poundian landscape littered with broken statues' - Michael Hulse, Poetry Review. 'Abrupt, pared-back, given to juxtapositions that reshape the urban world her poetry evokes with satirical insight and a dry wicked humour, Ryan's poetry is no easy thing... More the demotic of a dystopia than the vernacular of a republic, Ryan's use of language - its truncation, tautness and drama - cuts equally across the body politic and the scene of poetry. Throughout all of this, her humour, insight and tight music both test and engage the reader. She gives street-learning a classical voice; post-modernism, experience' - Michael Brennan, Poetry International Web.

Gig Ryan was born in 1956 and grew up in Melbourne. She has published six collections of poetry in Australia: The Division of Anger (1981); Manners of an Astronaut (1984); The Last Interior (1986); Excavation (1990); Pure and Applied (1998), which won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry; and Heroic Money (2001). Ryan is also a freelance reviewer and a songwriter, performing and releasing three albums with Disband (1998) and Driving Past (1999, 2006). She lives in Melbourne, and has been poetry editor of the Melbourne Age since 1998.