AustLit

'I always get the sense after reading his poetry that Richard James Allen must thrive on human connection. In this latest anthology, a poem could be short as the line of a single sentence (excluding the title for it) or long and potentially unwieldy, filling 17 pages with concepts and riffs far more complex, yet entreating the listener/reader to persist with the seemingly one-sided conversation. I last reviewed Allen’s Fixing the Broken Nightingale (2014) and, upon embarking the reading of this new collection, I was reminded repeatedly about what I enjoy and value in his writing – an ever-deepening gift and capacity to bring together words, phrases, pauses, gaps, alignments, mal-alignments and punctuations that trigger our senses, our memories, our consciences and our consciousness with things we know (which we had forgotten) and things we didn’t know that could be known.' (Introduction)