RATTLED

Rattled is a thought-provoking, heart-in-your-throat memoir that begins in outrage and ends as a celebration of the howling wind of change sweeping the globe.

Rattled is a rare, first-person account of surviving the stalker experience. Of a world made unsafe by a stranger. Of a life transformed by anxiety and fear. There's the writer's fear of being alone, her compulsion to stay in public places and avoid predictable routines. There's the horrible uncertainty of not knowing whether she should fear for her life, maybe even the lives of her children. There's the dreadful knowledge that, ultimately, she's powerless to make any of this stop. There are also the writer's previous experiences of belittlement, domestic violence, gendered harassment. There is the research the writer has done into misogynism around the world, into shocking numbers and statistics, and into the daily experiences of half of the population across the globe. And then there is the writer. A poet by trade, skilfully weaving these three braids together: the immediate, the personal, and the general. What we end up with is a fresh and poetic perspective on women and safety in society. Alarming and sometimes darkly amusing, Rattled brings personal experience together with extensive research. It explores the connections between stalking and other types of gendered harassment and discovers a much bigger problem - an underlying misogyny that over half the population are dealing with on a daily basis. Through conversations with the women and men working to combat this issue, the writer articulates many reasons for anger, but also good reasons for hope. Ellis Gunn is originally from Scotland where she published three collections of poetry. Since moving to Australia, her work has been published in various journals and anthologies including Cordite Poetry Review, foame:e, Rabbit, Southerly, Stylus Lit and Tincture. She is poetry editor for Gunn Transnational Literature and runs, with Jill Jones, Little Windows Press.