AustLit

'My poems are visual representations of reading. In our culture, this activity is usually silent and optically complex. Conventional meanings are often simple compared to the actual signs and their contexts, which in turn are rarely exploited for poetic potential. My usual way of dealing with this seems simple in retrospect: I imagine the context of the linguistic event, and within that make one gesture. So: one sequence, one page, one word, one letter; often all of the ‘ones’ together. To work through an idea may take many separate gestures, producing something like variations.

'I have made poems using a range of materials: plastic letters, dry-transfer letters, sticky vinyls, MDF cut-outs; and methods: silk-screen printing, photocopying, mechanical and electric typewriters. Since the advent of the PC, most of my work is on the computer. The individual sequences in this book are usually printed on loose A4 pages, tucked into plastic folders. –Alex Selenitsch'

Source : publisher's blurb

''The only Sundays I looked forward to were spent with my beloved Australian nanna Kathleen Mary McCarthy. I would sit with Nanna McC — listening to her stories unwind — and watch her pickle onions and brew ginger beer for Sister Kate's fete. She always cared for unloved and unwanted orphans. She would send me out to play with them. I didn't understand that I was playing with stolen children. I used to think Nanna McC was a kind of saint. I knew she was sent into service as a domestic slave, but it was not until that moment I understood that she was a Bush Mary.' — Teena McCarthy' (Publication summary)

‘Making the wings was a joyful process that continues my explorations of symmetry and asymmetry.’ — Catherine Vidler

'Created with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Paint, visual poet Catherine Vidler’s ‘wings’ — at once playful and ominous — multiply and develop across this enigmatic and wordless collection.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The old hill near where I grew up was outwardly ruined: its pines were dead, its vines gone to seed and its sheds, which once held some purpose, sunk and rusted. With my immature logic I considered this place open and powerful, even though the land was enclosed by a wire fence and fallow from overcultivation and neglect. Like other places in the world, the traces of colonial settlement here held dull, sour feelings. The entire place seemed displaced from itself; maybe nothing could belong there.

'Writing these poems has something to do with being in lands like this. As a child that hill gave me my first feeling of personal privacy, even though it was open, even though it was fenced for someone else, and perhaps because the fence was there. The poems here express indignation at the eventual consequences of privacy. Yet, equally, privacy fascinates me. Equally, fences fascinate me – their lines, their tensions, their bending. I am not the first to say that poetry is a form of enclosure, but I want to say it here again, anyway. I love how permeable this form of enclosure can be. In the same way, I loved how the fence around that private hill would bend as I moved through it.

'–Lucy Van'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Held under an incorrect adverb, the slowness of this book is expressed as intransigent buffering and refusal of optimisation. A syrupy coherence runs through these poems; passing thoughts and bits of language stick to their surfaces. The book is shaped by a stubborn commitment to inclusive imprecision which seeks companionship with error and with the grit and offcuts we collect in the course of living.

'Objects of the industrial world are beheld in their strangeness and excess. An awareness of the hands, machines and historic forces that produce our material realities directs these poems, along with the attempt to understand that objects arrive with afterlives and consequences.

'Archive-shuffling was a useful model for writing, one that was connected to a desire to amplify minor histories and attend to the technologies of connection that wire, thread and beam us into the present. Voices drop out, a phrase is misremembered, the test pattern is the viewing event. If there’s static on the line it’s a happy bit of chance, an instructive interruption.

'A go-slow is a pointed withdrawal of effort, as well as a chance to cultivate pleasure in slackness. Does a state of continued slowness become atrophy? Perhaps this explains the instances of breakage and depletion. The poems in Slowlier are propelled by the oscillation between an acquiescence which can only wryly index decline, and the desire to use the poem to scaffold and energise activities that kick against the logic of inevitability.

'–Ella O'Keefe'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'As I write this, fires are burning out of control on Kangaroo Island and all along the east coast of Australia. Lives, homes, half a billion animals: gone. As I write this, I am awaiting a blood sunset, the kind that filters the land through a lens of pink, helping everything to complement the colour of my acrylic nails. As I write this, citizens of the USA (and the world) are holding their collective breath awaiting retaliation from the Iranian army in response to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. As I write this, I can tell the three avocados in the fruit bowl beside me will all ripen tomorrow morning. As I write this, I am wondering if I can afford to renew my gym membership and what will happen to my body if I don’t.

'As I write this, I question the necessity of a poem – written on and with and for atoms, spoken through waves – combustible, ephemeral, biodegradable. Each poem in this book exists in two forms, both inhabiting a unique state of decay or decomposition (perhaps re-composition?). How you choose to engage is entirely up to you. Read this book back to front, front to back, upside down, right way round. Start at the beginning, in the middle; breathe it in one word at a time. Use it as a doorstop, as Tinder, as rolling paper – but read it first if only to revel in its potential/futility.

'–Em König'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'It is twenty years since Night Song and Other Poems was published. That was a poetic recording of my journey from childhood, through adolescence, marriage and a return to Australia from twelve years in Aotearoa New Zealand. The foci in that book – identity, family, childhood – were deliberately occluded. My sexuality, in the 1980s of its writing, was presented as though I was at the time a straight man coming to terms with my Wiradjuri heritage. I skirted around Aboriginal politics and identity.

'No more. The journey continues in this book and I, as tour guide, take you to unvisited, secret places that were definitely not seen to be acceptable or proper to visit in the past. The Mabo judgement informed much of my thinking in Night Song and there is no doubt that the same-sex marriage debate of 2018 and its outcome inform these poems. They are less tentative and far more certain in my expression of Aboriginal and sexual identity and acceptance.

'My real life experiences are here – expressed guts and all – far more honestly than before, and hang the consequences in the open. For me, wholly healthy. A long-time friend has often said, ‘It’s amazing how death changes you.’ Not living authentically has been a living death for me. Like the Ancient Mariner, I have unshackled multiple albatrosses from my being, and have finally blessed all those facets of myself once believed to be slimy, ugly and at all costs to be avoided. The Murrumbidgee is a river I was born next to … and now, seventy and more years later, am returned to.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'The writing that follows arose from states of joy, anguish, ambivalence and contemplation. The poems come from a period of ten years, while other poetic, essayistic and diaristic pieces were produced with intensity over a shorter duration.

'Not long ago we humans began to share typed and contained expressions – whimsical, crass, artful, profound, wounded – instantly and with a large audience, through an expanding web of fibre optics. The poems straddle the rise of networked and relatively indiscriminate platforms for communication: some were produced before their rise, and fed by silence, while others were produced after, and fed by the ghost crackle of digitised speech.

'The prose poems and prose all come from after, but from a period within the after when I’d left the main conduits. At the outset of my asceticism, I found I had a compulsion to communicate to a wide audience. I sought to satisfy this compulsion, which I’d never felt so strongly, and began sending letters to myself by email, with a changing group of people as BCC recipients. As I wrote I felt I was consciously or unconsciously blending an older, poetic address – Eliot’s ‘I’ talking to itself or to nobody in particular – with recent communicative impulses. This seemed to create new possibilities for what the poem could be, and what it could enter into, as a form of mediated performance.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'We find ourselves in love or out of it; in a friendship but with an enemy; under contract; inscribed by the law; giving birth; accompanied by ghosts; making pacts; in pursuit of a lost object; oriented towards new and unknown attachments.

'We find ourselves in a relation, even when that relation is broken or non-reciprocal.

'This book is about relations and their ambiguous intimacies. The three poems approach the question of how to endure, survive, destroy or protect the relationships that both constrain and make life possible.

'I wrote these poems while reading the work of Andrew Brooks, Brandon Brown, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Silvia Federici, Elena Gomez, Stefano Harney, Saidiya Hartman, C L R James, Fred Moten, Jordy Rosenberg, Hortense Spillers, Wendy Trevino and Frank Wilderson III. The three poems that comprise this book are in debt to these thinkers and should be read as marginal notes to their ideas.

'One way to perceive relations is to study them intently and to construct a poetics in their shadow.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'Once I had a dream about a sea mollusc that latched onto the inside of my calf, and stayed there. The logic of the dream made me understand that the mollusc wasn’t actually a mollusc, but the mollusc was a poem, not mine, but one that I had read. The poem wasn’t identifiable, but the poem was a good poem, and I woke up with questions. What, exactly, do I want from poetry? What space does poetry hold (in the body, in the mind, in society)? What is the work of poetry? Why does it always return so persistently (that is, both for me, personally, and in a broader historical sense), and what makes it stick?' (Introduction)

'Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. "Are you feeling helpless and angry? I am. I'm having a quiet rage against the material and immaterial machine. Thank you for holding me. This book is a shard of frustration. It's a place to process emotion. Angry and curious, I recently dived into some dark online spaces that I hope one day will be lost, and documented words and phrases used about and against women. I'm working with the concept of printing itself: its terminology and actions are historically drawn from the human body. As an experimental letterpress printer, I often use words to give paper a hard time, and the audience can usually witness the marks left by my processes. In this physical book I have had to think flatter, within the restrictions of contemporary digital print processes." Caren Florance' (Publication summary)

'This book has multiple fire exits. This book has too many keys. You can climb through a window into this book. Some of these poems are not on the lease, and you are willing to take it all the way to the Residential Tenancies Authority.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says ‘a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’. These poems ask what proofs of stability we build when our homes and selves are in perpetual flux.

After the Demolition is about rebuilding as much as it is about taking apart. It is about moving, and about moving on – what we leave behind, and what we attach more firmly to ourselves. When a place is gone – because we’ve given the keys back, or because the locks are lopped off – our attachment can drive us towards saudade, nostalgia, replication. We mythologise the flaws of our past haunts and past lives, and this determines the ways we start over when everything is air rights.'

Source: Author's blurb.

'Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters writen by that teenage daughter – me – handed around family back home, disappeared. Yet letters from that mother to her teenage daughter – me – remained protected in my red life-journey suitcase. I carried them across time and landscapes as a mother would carry her baby in a thaga.

'In 1978–79, I was living in an Aboriginal girls’ hostel in the Bentley suburb of Perth, attending senior high school. Mum and I sent handwritten letters to each other. I was a small-town teenager stepping outside of all things I had ever known. Mum remained in the only world she had ever known.

'Nganajungu Yagu was inspired by Mother’s letters, her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture. A substantial part of that culture is language, and I missed out on so much language interaction having moved away. I talk with my ancestors’ language – Badimaya and Wajarri – to honour ancestors, language centres, language workers and those Yamaji who have been and remain generous in passing on cultural knowledge.

'–Charmain Papertalk Green'  (Publication summary) 

'Yuiquimbiang is part of an ongoing project to create an ecopoetic form that integrates political essay and environmental poetics: a project that evolved out of my double life as a poet and environmental activist. It was driven by a desire to develop a radical ecopoetic form that would effectively communicate Australia’s ecological crisis as encountered in two specific regions – East Gippsland and the Monaro – and enact an alternative inhabitation of the land.

'The series of mainly long-form texts in this collection is grounded in extensive walking, listening and research. A concomitant slow reading is encouraged. In the drafts, the work included detailed references that have been distilled here in the notes section at the end. I have spent decades attending to this place, and continue to search for a glimpse of the pre-European grasslands and forests and celebrate their rare survival. The work attempts to defy the continuing colonial violence that permits and supports the undoing of the land.

'‘Yuiquimbiang’ is the first recorded European mishearing/ misrepresentation of a Ngarigu word, written down by John Lhotsky in 1834 as the name of a Monaro run, which later became known as Eucumbene. The Eucumbene River, once referred to as the East Branch of the Snowy River, was excluded from the 2002 intergovernmental agreements to return environmental flows to the Snowy.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I once wrote to a poetry advice column because I was afraid of my emotions and the havoc they wreaked on me. I called them ‘a huge problem’ but Diana Hamilton responded: ‘Feeling pleasure is a legitimate way of developing as a person-writer!’

'We got a kitten and I tried to write poems for her. Or some other (many) times I had a thought and realised I shouldn’t say it out loud only to find myself speaking it. When these turned to poems. Could there be a poet in the sense of a hare or another graceful creature or perhaps bitter and less warm-blooded. Like endives.

'Or when you want to write poems for the world but … and maybe a museum exhibition about a colonial botanist who collected timber specimens.

'Joined a reading group with some people who turned out to almost all be poets we read Das Kapital volume 1 which stuck with me I think my communist spirit which was born that year was also part poet.

'It’s sometimes like a heat pack muscle relaxant & then you finally can read in bed in the evenings without checking on your cat.

'I’m afraid to share more because of what emotions have done to my poetry but you can read and devein them in your own time. There is a YouTube tutorial for it probably.

'Or full communism or how Amy De’Ath says ‘i wish for us another world where we might live freely … a world of dank memes and slick gifs’.

'–Elena Gomez' (Publication 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)

'Horses have been intrinsic to much of human history. Their connection to human activities has always been dualistic but have also been constantly beset with ironies. Equine connections to human activities have always been dualistic: horses are linked with both deities and domestic drudgery; lauded as symbols of freedom and subservience; relied upon a vital means of transportation and agricultural labour, or considered a luxurious indulgence. In Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, artistic and literary representations of horses started a tendency towards the anthropomorphic, moving away from dead-eyed mechanical portraits. In the eighteenth century, romanticised portrayals of horses began a steady rise to primacy. Today, horses maintain a liminal position enjoyed by few animals: they are not quite pets, but not quite livestock. They are still working animals, but also easily replaced by machines or human athletes. Scientific knowledge of how to best raise, train and manage horses is flourishing, yet long cultures of anecdotes and training theories, grounded in highly subjective and often questionably founded interpretations of equine behaviour, reign supreme in many circles.

'Who is Romeo? He was not my horse. In life he was a symptom of all that is wrong with industrial-scale equine production. He fell victim to human interests in as many ways as it was possible to fall. Well-meaning ignorance is as dangerous as malice. Amongst horse people, this is also often called love.'

Source: Author's blurb.