Description

The Invisible Worm: Lived Experience in Literary Ignominy
by “The Porno Poet”
FORTHCOMING: 2027/01/26 (INVASION / AUSTRALIA DAY)

A forensic and deeply personal account of one of Adelaide, South Australia’s most notorious yet buried literary scandals.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a psychologically disabled poet was publicly humiliated and effectively exiled from Adelaide’s literary establishment after performing transgressive poetry at Friendly Street Poets.  What began as a reading quickly escalated into a moral panic. In the pages of The Adelaide Review, the poet’s work was accused of “witchcraft,” and he was branded “the invisible worm” — a loaded allusion to William Blake’s The Sick Rose, implying corruption, contagion, and hidden sexual deviance.

This book offers the first full insider account of the scandal and the systemic disablism that underpinned it. It situates the events at a unique cultural nexus in Adelaide at the time — where Disability Arts, transgressive writing, and sex work-adjacent literature briefly intersected.  Among the key figures in this milieu was Teri-Louise Kelly (TLK), the noted transgender punk writer and performer whose own boundary-pushing work was also gaining attention, including features on ABC Radio National.

Drawing on personal testimony, archival material, and cultural analysis, The Invisible Worm examines how a psychologically disabled writer was othered, pathologised, and erased from the literary record.  The author, who disappeared from the Adelaide poetry scene for nearly two decades following the events, returns here to document what happened — and why it mattered.

Interwoven with this account is a broader reflection on experimental writing in Adelaide during this period, including the pioneering asemic writing of Tim Gaze and the raw, beat-inflected poetry of Ivan Rehorek (Avalanche). Together, these voices formed part of a marginal but vital underground that challenged the conservative boundaries of South Australian literature.

Provocative, unflinching, and long overdue, The Invisible Worm is both a personal reckoning and a critical document of literary exclusion, disability, and the politics of transgression in Australian poetry.