The kool-aid of The Kool-Aid Dispenser stands for any number of things: grief, enduring institutionalized foolery, either the nonsense of handed-down beliefs, or their denial. And, backwards, it is about the power of language to discover and surprise us. The Kool-Aid Dispenser contains poems of loss, balanced by as many that celebrate renewal and hope. The elegies which make up the first section move from the personal to the universal, concluding with a touching tribute to Musgrave's friend, the late poet Jordie Albiston. The book's last section, 'Koels to Newcastle', deals with the local and the domestic, yet as with the whole of the book, these are always placed squarely in relation to larger contexts through tensile and energetic lines which impel language towards being alive to the world.
