The Crumbling Mansion

'Freyberg's sexy landscape is the Kings Cross of queer history; a dream/ memoire, sharply observed, calling full blast from an era bulldozed and broken. Liquid with desire, brutal and beautiful, in all the drawn out tenderness maturity brings.' - Kerri Shying




'The Crumbling Mansion really rips down the page. It's a series of interrelated snapshots and vignettes that read like mini chapters in a verse novella. The poems are tactile and visceral and conjure well a scene: the crumbling mansion is a gothic pile of many rooms- art, wine, philosophy and music; a burgeoning, blossoming, sweaty, yearning sexuality and desire for long denied and luridly painted fruit. There's the shadow of AIDS and the shadow of fathers: anxiety and a desperate desire to fill an identity and madly misspend a lost youth. Underpinning it all is the grounding respite and hope of art, and the salvation and identity to be found in artistic creation. There are also some delicate and finely painted pieces of the natural world.' - Tug Dumbly




'The denizens of a crumbling mansion coil at the heart of this collection, a shifting multi-vocal performance capturing an inner city milieu frayed by time but gentle in memory. Freyberg is a fearless scribe of personal transformation and regeneration, with an eye for the fleeting nature of glory and joy. He reignites the forgotten voices of Kings Cross and fills them with compassion and yearning. Freyberg's writing has an elasticity of purpose and subject; with loss, the knife edge of gentrification and nostalgia clinging to plangent evocations of nature, injustice and desire.' - Rico Craig