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Giramondo Publishing Giramondo Publishing i(A59354 works by) (Organisation) assertion (a.k.a. Giramondo Publishing Company)
Born: Established: 1995 ;
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1 4 y separately published work icon Heat no. 6 (New Series) Newcastle : Giramondo Publishing , Z1082891 2003 periodical issue
1 y separately published work icon J. S. Harry Selected Poems J. S. Harry , Nicolette Stasko , J. S. Harry , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 23071026 2021 selected work poetry

'When J.S. Harry died in 2015 she was acknowledged as one of the great female poets of her generation, alongside Fay Zwicky, Antigone Kefala, Jennifer Maiden and Judith Rodriguez.

'This commemorative volume gathers poems from all her collections, as well as new poems written in the last years of her life.

'As the use of initials in her writing name suggests, Jann Harry was a very private person. She was also gentle, kind, solicitous and endlessly curious – she would probe, enquire, pursue – everything seemed interesting to her. And she had another quality which was extraordinary, and which, along with her shyness and curiosity, is such a powerful presence in her poetry: this was her attentiveness to the life of the natural world and its creatures.

'Her poems typically take a quizzical stance, which holds a strange or complex moment up to scrutiny, and then pursues its implications. Her attention is caught by the smallest effects of nature, the delicate responses of animals – and also the gestures and words of humans, finely observed, with a sense of the mystery or menace they contain. The effect may be comic or surreal – or fierce, in its condemnation of oppression. Her mastery of the poetic line – the pause, the sudden shift in emphasis or perspective – and above all her interest in language, enhance these effects. Peter Porter rightly declared Harry to be 'the most arresting poet working in Australia today'.

'The poems included in Selected Poems were chosen by J.S. Harry herself, and her long-time friend, the poet Nicolette Stasko.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 2 y separately published work icon The Dancer : A Biography for Philippa Cullen Evelyn Juers , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 22958369 2021 single work biography

'The new book by prize-winning biographer Evelyn Juers, author of House of Exile and The Recluse, portrays the life and background of a pioneering Australian dancer who died at the age of twenty-five in a remote town in India.

'A uniquely talented dancer and choreographer, Philippa Cullen grew up in Australia in the 1950s and 60s. In the 1970s, driven by the idea of dancing her own music, she was at the forefront of the new electronic music movement, working internationally with performers, avant-garde composers, engineers and mathematicians to build and experiment with theremins and movement-sensitive floors, which she called body-instruments. She had a strong sense of purpose, read widely, travelled the world, and danced at opera houses, art galleries and festivals, on streets and bridges, trains, clifftops, rooftops. She wrote, I would define dance as an outer manifestation of inner energy in an articulation more lucid than language. An embodiment of the artistic aspirations of her age, she died alone in a remote hill town in southern India in 1975.

'With detailed reference to Cullen’s personal papers and the recollections of those who knew her, and with her characteristic flair for drawing connections to bring in larger perspectives, Evelyn Juers’ The Dancer is at once an intimate and wide-ranging biography, a portrait of the artist as a young woman.'

Source : publication summary

1 1 y separately published work icon Human Looking Andy Jackson , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 22958297 2021 selected work poetry

'A ground-breaking insight into the experience of disability, from a distinguished poet who has lived with Marfan Syndrome, including severe spinal curvature, and whose poems give voice to those who are often treated as ‘other’ or alien. 

'The poems are visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen.

'The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to ‘correct’. They range widely, finding figures to identify with in mythology and history, art and photography, poetry and fiction. A number of poems deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment, and with violence against disabled people. Others emerge out of everyday life, and the effects of illness, pain and prejudice. The strength of the speaking voice is remarkable, as is its capacity for empathy and love. ‘I, this wonderful catastrophe’, the poet has Mary Shelley’s monstrous figure declare. The use of unusual and disjunctive – or ‘deformed’ – poetic forms, adds to the emotional impact of the poems.'

Source : publication summary

1 4 y separately published work icon Last Letter to a Reader Gerald Murnane , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 22958194 2021 selected work criticism essay

'Final work by internationally acclaimed Australian author Gerald Murnane, reflecting on his career as a writer, and the fifteen books which have led critics to praise him as ‘a genius on the level of Beckett’.

'A book which will appeal equally to Murnane’s legion of fans, and to those new to his work, attracted by his reputation as a truly original Australian writer.

'In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane began a project which would round off his career as a writer – he would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary archives, the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. But as the reports grew, they themselves took on the form of a book, Last Letter to a Reader. The essays on each of his works travel through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances which gave rise to the writing, images, associations, reflections on the theory of fiction, and memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration which accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving ending to what must surely be his last work as death approaches. ‘Help me, dear one, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.’

Source : publication summary

1 4 y separately published work icon Take Care Eunice Andrada , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 22958120 2021 selected work poetry

'TAKE CARE explores what it means to survive within systems not designed for tenderness. Bound in personal testimony, the poems situate the act of rape within the machinery of imperialism, where human and non-human bodies, lands, and waters are violated to uphold colonial powers. Andrada explores the magnitude of rape culture in the everyday: from justice systems that dehumanise survivors, to exploitative care industries that deny Filipina workers their agency, to nationalist monuments that erase the sexual violence of war.

'Unsparing in their interrogation of the gendered, racialised labour of care, the poems flow to a radical, liberatory syntax. Physical and online terrain meld into a surreal ecosystem of speakers, creatures, and excavated histories. Brimming with incantatory power, Andrada’s verses move between breathless candour and seething restraint as they navigate memory and possibility. Piercing the heart of our cultural crisis, these poems are salves, offerings, and warnings.'

Source : publication summary

1 4 y separately published work icon The Magpie Wing Max Easton , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21947345 2021 single work novel

'Helen, Walt and Duncan are looking for ways to entertain themselves in the sprawl of Sydney’s western suburbs. Walt, scrappy and idealistic, wants to prove a point, and turns to petty vandalism. His friend Duncan sticks to his fledgling football career, and sexual encounters in strange houses. Walt’s sister Helen, restless and seeking something larger than herself, is forced by scandal to leave the family home. As they move into adulthood they gravitate to the dingy glamour of the inner-city suburbs, to escape their families’ complicated histories, and in search of new identities, artistic, sexual and political.

'The Magpie Wing is set on football fields, in punk gigs, and in dilapidated and gentrifying pubs, moving from the nineties to the present, and between the suburbs and the inner city. Max Easton’s debut novel explores how, even in a city divided against itself, disparate communities – underground music scenes, rugby league clubs, communist splinter groups – share unexpected roots.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 1 y separately published work icon Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21947227 2021 single work novella

'‘From the discomfort of my own home I buy dresses, look up recipes, do online surveys.’ In Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, an unnamed young woman in her late twenties navigates unemployment, boredom, chronic illness and online dating. Her activities are banal – applying for jobs, looking up horoscopes, managing depression, going on Tinder dates. ‘I want to tell someone I love them but there is no one to tell,’ she says. ‘Except my sister maybe. I want to pick blackberries on a farm and then die.’ She observes the ambiguities of social interactions, the absurd intimacies of sex and the indignity of everyday events, with a skepticism about the possibility of genuine emotion, or enlightenment. Like life, things are just unfolding, and sometimes, like life, they don’t actually get better. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s novella-in-fragments blends artifice with sincerity, is darkly funny, and alive to the incongruous performance that constitutes getting by.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 1 y separately published work icon Beneath the Tree Line Jane Gibian , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21947110 2021 selected work poetry

'Jane Gibian’s poetry is remarkable for its clarity of perception and its sensitivity to the details and rhythms of life – whether in nature or in social routines. The poetry’s engagement is first and foremost with the natural environment, and with the contrast between the human engagement – with its extremes of fascination and despair – and the natural world itself, disinterested and unforgiving. The landscapes range from the coast to the forest, from rivers in urban settings to country towns and their surroundings. Their beauty is felt alongside their vulnerability to degradation. Throughout there is the awareness of connectedness, between people, places, seasons, animate and inanimate things – and the power of language to celebrate these connections, to register joy and constraint, and to draw on different kinds of reality. Later in the collection, Gibian’s poetry focuses on the passage of time and its vagaries, the ancient cycles of nature, the threat of change, personal histories, the fleeting moments of awareness captured in poems.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 1 y separately published work icon Gentle and Fierce Vanessa Berry , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21947021 2021 selected work essay

'To be gentle is to resist the privileging of command above compassion. It is a quiet voice, a persistent whisper, calm and consoling. Ferocity is an armour, a forceful expression of resolve and protection. To be fierce is to know the intensity of the edges of feeling. It is the voice that calls out, intending to be heard.

'Having spent her life in city environments, Vanessa Berry’s experiences with animals have largely been through encounters in urban settings, representations in art and the media, and as decorative ornaments or kitsch. The essays in Gentle and Fierce suggest that these encounters provide meaningful connections, at a time when the world we share with animals is threatened by environmental destruction. Berry responds with attentiveness and empathy to her subjects, which include a stuffed Kodiak bear, a Japanese island overrun with rabbits, a porcelain otter and Georges Perec’s cat. The essays are accompanied by illustrations which reflect her eye for detail and her background as an artist and zine maker.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 2 y separately published work icon Sydney Spleen Toby Fitch , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21946953 2021 selected work poetry

'Sydney Spleen takes Baudelaire’s concept of spleen as melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything – and combines it with a contemporary irony so as to articulate the causes of our doom and gloom: corporate rapacity, climate change, disaster capitalism, the plague, neo-colonialism, fake news, fascism, and how to raise kids in a world fast becoming obsolete. The backdrop of this collection of poems is sparkling Sydney and its screens, through which the poet mainlines global angst. Fitch’s ‘spleen poems’, with their radical use of form and tone, are as much an aesthetic experience as a literary one – translation becomes homage, satire, song; essays become lyrics, rants, dreams. What is a poem when ‘no one believes in the future now anyway’? Nor is the collection lacking in humour. Sydney Spleen mocks everything in its crystal glass, yet still finds real moments of connection to cherish.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 1 y separately published work icon Second City : Essays from Western Sydney Catriona Menzies-Pike (editor), Luke Carman (editor), Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21162291 2021 anthology essay

'Second City is a showcase of the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s Western Suburbs such a fertile region for writers.

'Beginning with Prime Minister’s Award-winning author Felicity Castagna’s warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz’s call to recognise the revolutionary act of public knitting to Frances An’s ‘counter-revolutionary’ attack on the repressive clichés of ‘women of colour’, Sheila Ngoc Pham on the importance of education in crossing social and ethnic boundaries, and May Ngo’s cosmopolitan take on the significance of the shopping mall, the collection offers complex and humane insights into the dynamic relationships between class, culture, family, and love. Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Second City’, from which this collection takes its title, is both a political autobiography and an elegy for a Parramatta that has been lost to gentrification and redevelopment. Zohra Aly and Raaza Jamshed confront the prejudices which oppose Muslim identity in the suburbs, the one in the building of a mosque, the other in the naming of her child. Rawah Arja writes in a comic vein on the complexity of the Lebanese-Australian family, Martin Reyes on the overlay of experiences as a hike in the Dharawal National Park recalls an earlier trek in Bangkong Kahoy Valley in the Phillipines. Finally, Yumna Kassab’s essay on Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that Western Sydney writing can be represented by no single form, opinion, style, poetics, or state of mind.

'The cultural backgrounds represented here include Cambodian, Pakistani, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Filipino, South American, Iraqi and Turkish.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 1 y separately published work icon Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous Mark Anthony Cayanan , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21162052 2021 selected work poetry

'Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous is a work of wild erudition and rococo elaboration, a collection of poems that loosely channels the dynamic of desire and inhibition in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. The poems follow the trajectory of the ageing Aschenbach’s pursuit of youth and beauty, transmuting his yearning and resistance into jittery flirtations with longing, decay and abandonment against a backdrop of political violence. The poems have an exuberant candour, formed by polyphonic allusions which enact the intersectionality of the speaker; by turns melodramatic, flirtatious, satirical. Like the tragic protagonist of Death in Venice, Cayanan’s collection manifests a longing for extroversion sabotaged by its own will. It is a queer performance of anxiety and abeyance, in which the poems’ speakers obsessively rehearse who they are, and what they may be if finally spoken to.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 3 y separately published work icon No Document Anwen Crawford , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21161828 2021 single work essay

'A groundbreaking new work of non-fiction by one of Australia’s most respected essay writers.

'No Document is an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford’s book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. From the turmoil of grief and the solace of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, border policing, and especially our relationships with animals. No Document shows how love and resistance echo through time.

'Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, but here she draws on her background as a zine-maker and visual artist, and her training in poetry, to develop a new way of writing about the past, using a symphonic method of composition and collage. No Document is an urgent, groundbreaking work of non-fiction that reimagines the boundaries that divide us – as people, nations and species – and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 2 y separately published work icon Earth Dwellers Kristen Lang , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 20874283 2021 selected work poetry

'The Anthropocene – what can poetry do in this epoch in the Earth’s history defined by human impact? With its immersion in powerful wilderness landscapes, Earth Dwellers challenges our human-centredness by embracing perspectives which set the intimate delicacy of life forms against time scales that go back millions of years. These are deep-breath poems, full of touch and awareness, consolidated by their commitment to the ecologies that envelop us. Asked where we come from, the poems speak not of nations or tribes but of mosses, mountains, oceans, birds. And asked where we are going, the poems refer not to rockets or recessions, but to the biome, a place where consumption is a relationship and not a right. This is ecopoetry – where the natural world is primary, and humans have to find their place in it, rather than the other way around.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon Antipodean China Nicholas Jose (editor), Benjamin Madden (editor), Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 20874234 2021 anthology essay

'Antipodean China is a collection of essays drawn from a series of encounters between Australian and Chinese writers, which took place in China and Australia over a period of almost ten years, from 2011. The engagement between the writers could be defensive, especially given the need to depend on translators, but as each spoke about the places important to them, their influences and the literary forms in which they wrote, resemblances between them emerged, and the different perspectives contributed to a sense of common understanding, about literature, and about the role of the writer in society. In some cases the communication was even stronger, as when the Tibetan author A Lai speaks knowingly about Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria, and the two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan and J.M. Coetzee, discuss what the Nobel meant for each of them.

'The collection also includes writing by some of the best Chinese and Australian writers: novelists Brian Castro, Gail Jones, Julia Leigh, Liu Zhengyun, Sheng Keyi and Xu Xiaobin, poets Kate Fagan, Ouyang Yu, Xi Chuan and Zheng Xiaoqiong, and translators Eric Abrahamsen, Li Yao and John Minford.

'In the current situation of hostility and suspicion between the two countries, this collection presents what, in retrospect, may seem to have been an idyllic moment of communication and trust.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon Buried Not Dead Fiona McGregor , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 20874179 2021 selected work essay

'Buried Not Dead is a collection of writings on art, literature and performance, sexuality, activism and the life of the city. In these essays, written over twenty-five years, Fiona McGregor documents performance artists, writers, dancers, tattooists and DJs, some of them famous, like Marina Abramović and Mike Parr, while others, like Latai Taumoepeau, Lanny K and Kathleen Mary Fallon, are less well known. In capturing these figures and the scenes they inhabit, McGregor offers an expansive archive of art and life of a kind rarely recorded in our histories.

'Fiona McGregor’s immersion in her subject matter comes from a deep and enduring involvement in the worlds she represents. She came of age as an artist during an outpouring of performative queer culture, in a community that celebrated subversion, dissent and uninhibited partygoing, and in her writing she observes the shift from that moment towards new forms of cultural repressiveness. McGregor is a participant in her essays as well as a witness – she sees through an artist’s eyes and records what she perceives with a novelist’s insight. In excavating the lives of others, she reveals her own, and shows the possibilities that rest beneath the surface of our culture.' (Publication summary)

1 45 y separately published work icon A Body of Water : A Year's Notebook Beverley Farmer , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2020 Z7790 1990 selected work autobiography short story poetry diary
1 2 y separately published work icon The F Team Rawah Arja , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2020 18796999 2020 single work novel

'Meet Tariq Nader, leader of ‘The Wolf Pack’ at Punchbowl High, who has been commanded by the new principal to join a football competition with his mates in order to rehabilitate the public image of their school. When the team is formed, Tariq learns there’s a major catch – half of the team is made up of white boys from Cronulla, aka enemy territory – and he must compete with their strongest player for captaincy of the team.

'At school Tariq thinks he has life all figured out until he falls for a new girl called Jamila, who challenges everything he thought he knew. At home, his outspoken ways have brought him into conflict with his family. Now, with complications on all fronts, he has to dig deep to control his anger, and find what it takes to be a leader.

'In confronting and often hilarious situations, Tariq’s relationships with his extended Lebanese family and his friends are tested like never before, and he comes to learn that his choices can have serious consequences.'

1 3 y separately published work icon Homer Street Laurie Duggan , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2020 18796934 2020 selected work poetry

'A leading figure in Australian poetry, Laurie Duggan has been long celebrated for his vividly sensed observations of everyday life and his minimal and urbane style. This is his first publication with Giramondo.

'Laurie Duggan’s new collection begins with poems written during his last year in Britain, in Faversham, a market town in east Kent, with others written on a visit to Australia in 2016 and after his return in October 2018. They contribute to two ongoing sequences, ‘Allotments’, and ‘Blue Hills’, which alludes to the long-running domestic radio serial of the same name. These are made up of the brief haiku-like poems that Duggan has made his own: impressions, mysterious conjunctions, oddities and contradictions, the small details that express large forces, as in his observations of the landscape, the weather, domestic and suburban settings. In the final section, ‘Afterimages’, Duggan offers descriptions of paintings and comments on artists, and sometimes imaginary constructions of what a particular artist might have done, but the real point is to create poems which stand like art works in their own right.' (Publication summary)

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