AustLit

'Theory of Colours takes as its title and point of departure the influential nineteenth-century treatise on colour by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. In Li’s third full-length collection, colour — and its absence — is at once subject, structural principle and medium. Moving from the distant past, through the fleeting, unstable present, and into a series of speculative futures, the book elaborates worlds both familiar and strange — a country estate, a small town, a grand hotel, a tower. Informed by the spectral practices of early photography and cinema, as well as the visual and thematic conventions of ghost stories, westerns and science fiction, Li’s narratives of text and image are unsettling explorations of sequence and time, absence and haunting.' (Publication summary)

'Not knowing how to start this editorial, I lazily google ‘belong’. A grossly simplified e-dictionary pops up to tell me that ‘belong’ comes from Middle English: ‘be-’ + an archaic form of ‘long’. But rather than investigate longen like the diligent researcher I should be, I am temporarily sidetracked; I think intensely about ‘being long’, consider stretching out on the ground, pointing my toes, elongating my spine, straightening my fingers. I think about being the longest me I can be.' (Jessica Wilkinson Editorial introduction)

'What could Australian poetry look like at the moment? It could look like any kind of poetry, like any language formed in (mostly) turning lines. It could look like a thousand things. Here, it looks like this: one big picture with countless moving parts. We think it's a good picture. We know it's not the only one, but it's a contribution to a conversation that's always carrying on beyond the moment.' (Bella Li and Jill Jones Foreword introduction)

Bella Li launches Kent MacCarter's California Sweet. 

'Following on from the groundbreaking Argosy, Li's second collection Lost Lake ups the ante, taking the reader and literature alike into new reaches and realms of the imagination. Lost Lake, which exhibits Li’s distinctive use of text and image, consists of eight extended sequences of poetry, collage and photography, on subjects ranging from Dante’s Inferno and Steve Reich’s Different Trains, to the tomb of Newton and the archives of artist and autodidact Joseph Cornell. Through the eight sequences of Lost Lake, geography and music, history and architecture, works of art and literature, encounter each other in striking and unexpected ways, generating new hybrid objects. Lost Lake disassembles boundaries and challenges expectations of what a work of literature can be—its alchemy blooms in the spaces between eras, genres and forms.' (Publication summary)

'This innovative full-length collection, drawing inspiration from the surrealist collage novels of Max Ernst, is an arresting and utterly unique assemblage of poetry, collage and photography. In two parts, the book engages with themes of travel and exploration, language and loss, identity and originality, as well as the relationship between poetry and other disciplines: the visual arts, history, literature and film. Polyglot in sensibility and content, and daring in construction, Argosy defies categorisation. Grounded firmly in Australian contemporary poetic practice, the book is also outward-looking in its approach to form and content; it constitutes a landmark in both local and international poetics.' (Publication Summary)