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'The Espionage Act is the new poetry collection by the internationally renowned author, Jennifer Maiden. With her characteristic clear, powerful focus and crisp but sumptuous lyrical style, she analyses espionage in many senses, from the U.S. 1917 Espionage Act to the reflections on the Deep State, to tactical levels in conservative espionage, to its sexuality of fear, to covert promotion and funding of experimental art, to its reactions to primal digital technology, and to the mind itself in its acts of espionage.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Personal Histories
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 2 January 2021; (p. 18)
— Review of Steles 2019 selected work poetry ; Smoke 2019 selected work poetry ; Nganajungu Yagu 2019 selected work poetry ; The Espionage Act : New Poems 2020 selected work poetry -
Fringes of Sleep
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 419 2020; (p. 41)
— Review of The Espionage Act : New Poems 2020 selected work poetry'W.H. Auden once rebuked Percy Shelley for characterising poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To think this way is to confuse hard with soft power, coercion with persuasion. Poetry, as Auden famously wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’; he instead bestowed Shelley’s epithet upon ‘the secret police’. But in an age of surveillance and information warfare that has militarised the channels of everyday communication, the line between hard and soft becomes more difficult to draw. The very notion of a random or innocent signal seems laughably naïve as we are inundated by new suspicions and suspicions of news. But the state of mind in which there is always more meaning to be had is one that poetry invites us to inhabit. For Shelley, poems were ‘hieroglyphs’ and the poetic imagination an ‘imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man’. Is the poet an agent, then, of this secretive control? Perhaps Shelley was on Auden’s side all along.' (Introduction)
-
Fringes of Sleep
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 419 2020; (p. 41)
— Review of The Espionage Act : New Poems 2020 selected work poetry'W.H. Auden once rebuked Percy Shelley for characterising poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To think this way is to confuse hard with soft power, coercion with persuasion. Poetry, as Auden famously wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’; he instead bestowed Shelley’s epithet upon ‘the secret police’. But in an age of surveillance and information warfare that has militarised the channels of everyday communication, the line between hard and soft becomes more difficult to draw. The very notion of a random or innocent signal seems laughably naïve as we are inundated by new suspicions and suspicions of news. But the state of mind in which there is always more meaning to be had is one that poetry invites us to inhabit. For Shelley, poems were ‘hieroglyphs’ and the poetic imagination an ‘imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man’. Is the poet an agent, then, of this secretive control? Perhaps Shelley was on Auden’s side all along.' (Introduction)
-
Personal Histories
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 2 January 2021; (p. 18)
— Review of Steles 2019 selected work poetry ; Smoke 2019 selected work poetry ; Nganajungu Yagu 2019 selected work poetry ; The Espionage Act : New Poems 2020 selected work poetry
