Our Concealed Ballast

Situated in ‘a strange liminal time between a death and a birth’, Our Concealed Ballast is a bracingly hybrid work that combines elements of memoir, personal essay and art criticism. Built from a series of discontinuous passages, Marian Macken’s book reinvigorates what it means to ‘hold space’ for others — as a parent and an architect — in the wake of bereavement. Yet it is also a work concerned with time, chronicling the ways that grief and anticipation texture the present’s ongoingness.

It is a significant achievement to introduce, as this book does, a new spatio-temporal vocabulary for understanding and processing the experience of loss. This includes its formal fragmentation: each of its passages provides a temporary habitation, while the cuts between them activate a sense of dislocation and unmooring — as well as the possibility of another chronology. With poise and imagination, Macken has probed an almost unbearable gulf between moving and moving on.

Shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards