Central to aj carruthers’ work as a poet is the ongoing long poem Axis. Three instalments have been published in the form of three books: Axis Book 1: Areal (Vagabond Press, 2014), Axis Book 2 (Vagabond Press, 2019) and Axis Z Book 3 (Cordite Books, 2023). Axis Z Book 3 was reviewed in The Sydney Review of Books as a “step into a world of complete letter-freedom,” a book that offers a “preface to a new kind of unspeakable word, unfightable battle, and unwritable letter.”