AustLit

'i’m not sure it was ethics – politics, really – psychological – therefore everything to do with orientation, including a special sense of facing in the right direction, which, over time, i’ve attached to H Corbin’s interpretation of Sufism’s ta’wil – via Olson, Kelly & co – ‘the inevitable connection resulting from the double emphasis on the ‘visionary’ and the ‘processual’ that has been the heartland of our poetry from Blake and Whitman to Pound, Williams and Olson et al’ (G Quasha & C Stein, the Robert Kelly issue of Vort Magazine, edited by B Alpert, New York, 1974) – gloriously remembered from one’s 1970s Melbourne reading & discussion – hah! the Rushall Crescent Avant-Garde! – world wide web of the New Poetry – American, English, Australian – so, four or five years ago it was, hearing out another sentence from my familiar repertoire of negation, J Kinsella challenged ‘and what about the ethics of withholding?’ – ‘i’ll have to think about that,’ i said – buying time, postponing performance – till now, i guess, when a year-long conversation with prospective publisher K MacCarter about singularity, locality, expatriation, eased by occasional tots of the Japanese good stuff – during which i sometimes recast him as a Jonathan Williams, dual squire of Dentdale, Cumbria & Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, notwithstanding the Minnesota Lutheran he owned up to be – this between-ourselves correspondence ultimately delivers – and in leasttroubled unsureness for yonks – these English sweets – that is to say, all palate & tongue – my just desserts.

–Kris Hemensley' (Publication summary)

'This … (change is clAssy, gets you to the end of the queue, (symmetry it seems doesnt Do much as a theory of mind, still looks too much like music), and coz, Its so, a form of AndOrNotcarrytheOne (what If sounds like when youre dEad, (Next step, Licensing the numbers … and coz the end then lives in diagnosIn Extra time,

'… so here are some short, Demonstration silences. this first ones taken from the prayer manual for fixing a recalcitrant Device … (you’ll likely notice it smudges at the edge, but otherwise … (might be fair to follow

that with something more, idunno, Meaningful, you know, maybe a, pale skinny wink at the ethical klepto thatAnd as names think of themselves as philosophies, ratbag nouns with a crush on capital andEpileptic is the thing, blackmails time into fucking itself … (the great thing about words but is that you only have to say itWhatever Once and then its trUe. Stuff but, bEauty, the classic Medium, (though is it Fair to think while listening? (something of a recidivist witness, on Ice, (some hypocrisy of the forensics biz, Hidden in ubIquity, like, you know, It, (Profit (when youre far enough away, (comes under the statute of limitations, (all whitewash curators and sanitisers ofLike Cop This. (the words got no subconscious anymore, still has that habit of singing out loud … Anyway, … i’ll pray for you.

–Chris Mann' (Publication summary)

'I won’t keep you long. First, I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, on whose land the majority of this collection was written.

'Now you are about to read the poetry of an Arab Australian, which is a rare thing when it shouldn’t be. Now you are about to read the work of a queer Arab Australian, which is a rare thing when it shouldn’t be. Now you are about to read the life of a queer Muslim Arab Australian from Western Sydney, from a broke and broken family – not rare, but it should be.

'This is not a definitive statement on Islam. This is not a definitive statement on Arab identity, not Arab Australian identity, not bisexuality, not even Western Sydney. It is a statement – an exploration of me and what I’ve seen.

'The only thing I ask of you is that you do not stop with me. Discover the other diverse writers and poets in this country – find us, find our books. We’re here, and we’re growing.' (Publication summary)

'The Only White Landscape is an assembly point. Past instances of thought and memory have come together as directed when under threat. The swells of real-life changes underpinning the poetry are physical, social, geographic and romantic. But, that’s so usual: the attempt to find singularity in the ruptures – not meaning, not really. From loneliness to only-ness. Sometimes I run at night through the fields around my house and then sit on carpet to record the resulting language. ‘I feel so lyrical,’ I remember thinking at one point, mid-manuscript. I’m always seeking recognition. I want a conversation to surround my personal thoughts. I want to influence ‘you’ – your actions and opinions. Poetry can and will measure up to somebody’s sincerity levels but then he / she still might not love you. All the feels laid bare, the words persisting as evidence of what you might have thought, felt. The Only White Landscape is a submersion in the past, a landscape stripped of comforting colour, a set piece refigured in post like a photograph, my choices of emphasis directing and deflecting your attention. It feels like an outcome. I hope the poems keep you just as long as you want to be kept.' (Publication summary)

'Attn: Solitude isn’t a straight poetry book, nor is it a strict collation of cyborgian-emulated [chap+lady]book texts. The codework contents in this book do fragmentally fold [+ spit out of/from] poetic conventions. These microtexts do presentation-lap gently [yes: gently, albeit clinically, in some instances] at the cusp of code and poiesis.

'Attn: Solitude employs mezangelle – a type of quasi-cobbled conventionset born from 90s digital fomentation – to form packets of code-laced and culturally inflected output. You may choose to snippetswim in[to] these units of mezangelled output, these comprehension chips dragged kicking from one medium and screaming into another. You may not.

'If not, then … ? If-then-else.' (Publication summary)

'This book was written over two hundred years. It was started as a colonial project. From there it developed through the use of the archive as a consideration of historical narrative. The poem employs a Susan Howe-esque archival practice that selectively disseminates Canadian short stories to think about erasure and failures of settlement: to disclose an underlying colonial reality of the pastoral, and measures of inclusion and exclusion. The poems are familial but underlying this is the glowering absence of the historic, a generative absence which exemplifies how early / prairie literature is culpable in driving a national myth which forgoes Indigenous life.

'As a child I was fascinated with rope-braiding machines. Even before I could manage the handle, I could watch them for hours. I consider tension as a form of kinetic energy. Words from archives are interwoven, assembled to mimic this type of tension. These narratives are bound to the manner in which we write the histories of our nation. We are all of these stories, and they are none of us. This rope can be used to bind, or …' (Publication summary)

'Flat Exit is about greetings and departures, learning to let go and circle back to pick up what remains. These poems jump between north-eastern Victoria and Melbourne, romantic and platonic relationships, moments of personal triumph and those of shellshocked grief.

'Collected here in this sequence, they explore the dislocation that occurs when moving from regional Australian to its urban mass, and when falling in and out of love for the first time. The poems revolve from homesickness, to self-care, to finding a soul to complement my own at an unexpected time and in an unexpected place – and life before and after the death of a close friend.

'Many of these poems are autobiographical; some are fiction. My intention is not to be confessional but – as Gwen Harwood says – to establish 'a way of seeing'. Mine, as it's been so far.' (Publication summary)

'A Salivating Monstrous Plant began as an exploration of violence present in the act of speaking, including attempts and refusal to speak. I'm interested in the body's movements and gestures, and the methods by which our voices are included in that mechanism. The question is: how can language and the body interact to extend beyond communication, verbal or otherwise? These metaphors are about conveying sensory experience rather than symbolism, and they operate by integrating metaphor with the body – be it writing of the body into metaphor, or embodying the poetics of physical movements. Might the body exist outside of its functionality, removed from practical movements?'

'I used parts of this work to create a performance piece inspired by Butoh, a Japanese expressionist dance that responds to constraints in the movements of other traditional dance forms. Many poems were rewritten to adjust the original performance script. Hopefully, neither body nor language is favoured, and physical experiences are incorporated into textual metaphor. This embodied language can then push against what we perceive as unspeakable, and if that should fail, if speaking appears impossible, perhaps something can still be achieved in the attempts to speak.' (Author's summary)

'Aboriginal women are the great gatherers of many things—food, of course, but also stories and inner strength. The women who raised me had vast reserves of inner strength, and to pass that on was a powerful act of activism. In particular, they taught me to listen to the past as it speaks in the present.

'This work is about listening to the past and walking back over it, step after step, to see what you missed the first time. It speaks to what has been left out of official records, recordings and documents—the emotions, the other sides of paper—and what is not said. These poems engage with the ongoing, interventionist nation-state and the crime scene that is Australia in the lives of Aboriginal people. In contrast to state archives, museums, libraries, universities and collection agencies—and their methods of 'recording the lives' of Aboriginal people—my work explores the body where memories are stored as an archive; anchored and etched. Writing is an act of remembering a dismembered past.

'The title WALK BACK OVER alludes to a bridge across the Murrumbidgee River where I grew up but, more symbolically, mirrors the need to revisit our past. Much was made of the 2000 Reconciliation Walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge—many settler Australians walked across this and other bridges, and I am not cynical about that—but there are many other spans in Australia that must be walked: not just once, walked back over."—Jeanine Leane'  (Publication summary)

'"What is it I take for granted? Skin. The body's fragile, necessary, and sensitive clothing marked by culture accrues value (or otherwise) in particular places for no good reason but history, and an obdurate maintenance of relationships of power and (dis)possession. Hoping to unsettle presumptions of superiority and their mingled threads of colonial violence, I am writing to access and decolonise a white settler unconscious. In limited ways, again and again, poem by poem, by collage, by prose approximations to poems, I am joining a small and growing throng of writers questioning whiteness.

'This collection has been building for some years, prompted by thinkers and poets such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and more recently Peter Minter, Natalie Harkin and Shane Rhodes. Minter writes of a 'vision of a decolonised Australia, a place where settler and Indigenous cultures have begun to find an existential common ground that is beyond postcolonial'. White on White takes a path through histories and incidents, familial, social, and historical, thinking whiteness, in the hope of opening towards that 'existential common ground'."-Anne Elvey' (Publication summary)