Anna Poletti’s hello, world? is a subversive sex-positive and powerful deconstruction of patriarchy that looks at the erotic imagination and the role of technology and is explicitly feminist and anti-patriarchy.
Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade.
Still adjusting to life outside Australia, they turn to the internet to find a new anchor. Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal meets László, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a dominant guide.
His dating-app profile thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It’s a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfil.
But to do it, Seasonal must forget the hard-earned ways of keeping themself safe they developed in the milieu of violence and sexual threat that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia. At home, men were usually a threat. What if the roles were reversed?
Seasonal and László embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realise they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront what it has meant to be raised as woman in Australia, while László stages his own confrontation with his decision to leave Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
As the two improvise a theatre of domination in search of freedom, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for.
A reverse novel of education, where two people try to unlearn everything they think they know about intimacy, Poletti’s hello, world? dares to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality.
For over twenty years, Anna Poletti has researched how media shapes the meaning we attach to lived experience. Her recent books include Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (2020) and the Eisner Award–nominated collection Graphic Medicine (coedited with Erin La Cour, 2022). Anna lives in Melbourne.
hello, world? is published by Puncher & Wattmann and available from all great book sellers.
Image: hello, world? – courtesy of Puncher & Wattmann