Brendon is currently in the third year of his English BA. His creative work has been widely published in both print and electronic platforms, and he recently completed a 12 month stint as editor-in-chief of Writer’s Block Magazine. Last year he won the White Label Trois debut book competition, which has now resulted in his first collection, Vertigo to Go, published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in the UK.

Inspired by his wide reading of world poetry, fiction and theory, Brendon’s work demonstrates his keen interest in poetic form. Vertigo to Go comprises 29 individual poems that produce a complex narrative structure, shot through with wit, irreverence and vernacularity. At the same time, it is a book that confronts serious issues, braiding personal and planetary concerns. Described by his publisher as “a timely and searing examination of the current state of the world” and “a lyrical hymn to the power of poetry to sublimate pain and fear into art,” Brendon’s work has also won scholarly praise. Dr Emelia Quinn of the UvA English Department calls Vertigo to Go “a fast-paced and arresting snapshot of adolescence, exploding at the same time any comfortably nostalgic remembrance of a youth culture haunted by a deluge of microplastics and escalating species extinction.”

Before arriving at the UvA, Brendon’s adventurous life took him from New Zealand to South Africa, Australia, Vietnam, South America, France, the UK and many other places. After his English BA, he has ambitions to do postgraduate work and, ultimately, to teach literature and creative writing. For now, though, he is hard at work with his ongoing studies and his second book of poetry. “With my recent poems, I am trying to take my poetry in a more dispersive, language-generated direction—to get away from narrative in favour of a more associative mode of writing, while exploring an ecopoetics of post-anthropocentrism.”

Vertigo to Go can be purchased or ordered from most bookshops and a limited number of signed first editions are available through Brendon’s own website. There will be a Zoom launch on Friday 16 October, to which all members of the UvA community are invited (details via Brendon’s website).