G-d, Sleep, and Chaos (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780645920970)

G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is a startling debut collection that moves between the sacred and the profane, the comic and the devastating, the suburban and the transcendent.

Drawing on Jewish philosophy, mysticism and cultural memory, Alan Fyfe writes from the charged spaces where grief, addiction, love, labour, faith and self-destruction intersect. His poems inhabit train stations, caravan parks, welfare offices, shopping centres, construction sites and family kitchens, transforming ordinary Australian landscapes into places of revelation. Throughout the collection, divine presence appears not in certainty but in absence, contradiction and longing: a barefoot G-d waiting for a delayed bus, angels wandering industrial suburbs, sacred histories surfacing through everyday encounters.

Set largely across Western Australia, the poems are rich with local texture while engaging universal questions about mortality, belonging and meaning. Fyfe's voice is by turns tender, irreverent, philosophical and darkly funny. Formal experimentation sits comfortably alongside lyric intensity, with prose poems, dream sequences, elegies, love poems and midrashic reimaginings woven into a cohesive and deeply human whole.

Across seven sections, G-d, Sleep, and Chaos becomes a prayer for a broken world-one that refuses despair even while staring directly into it. Fiercely intelligent, emotionally fearless and linguistically inventive, this collection establishes Fyfe as a distinctive new voice in Australian poetry.