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ACT CUTE


Fremantle Press 2025




“Act Cute alchemises the body personal into political, revealing the blurred lines of play and power, desire and distance, meet cutes and lonely aesthetics; exquisite contradictions we carry, refracting the ordinary into a collection of poems that is startling, luminous, and deeply alive.” - Sara M. Saleh


In Act Cute, the poet addresses the gap between nostalgia and the wavering present, and asks how to perform a coherent self amidst personal, political, institutional, and canonical entanglements. Act Cute queers the experience of actor training and the decade of theatre practice since to ask “what can an actor do, against all this overlapping time?” Shifting between autofictive address and the personae of an unstable performance canon, Act Cute adopts the structural codes of romantic drama to frame the poet-as-actor through five sections: ‘Audition Sides’, ‘you stop me at the airport and tell me that you love me’, ‘twink death in Europa!!’, ‘Wedding Scenes’, and ‘forgiveness’. 


“It is a rare book of poetry that makes you feel as though you are being reconstituted as, reading, you assemble its words into lines – Act Cute is one of these. Perhaps because of its focus on character in all forms, but particularly from the perspective of the actor and theatre-maker, this is a book that scripts for us different ways of being in the world. While not disregarding the important political work this book does, it is also a book that (as the title Act Cute suggests) takes minor affects and cultural products seriously. There is no-one who writes about ‘B’ grade culture as seriously and wonder-full-y as Andrew Sutherland; only they would title a poem "hold on tight, spider monkey".” - Caitlin Maling



READ THE FIRST POEM

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Teeth begin their long erosion
home. The smile shifts out of
perfect position. Extractive futures: 

so many years of imprecision. Feels
harder and harder to take stock of
the weeks, the one week to the month

becomes the next. Sidelined
by the edges of words: proximity
to the feeling, and not the thing itself.

Moisturise the face until a pre-
historic slug. You are your own 
creation, and that can’t be forgiven. 

This second try it’s time to try
to write the book without re-
membering time, 
                                  desire,
                                                   viral,
                                                                 act.

Without, this was possible.
Without the words for cute.
Try me. I’ve got nothing left

to lose, and even more to lose.