AustLit

'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

'In the first half of 2020, Overland received a small grant to help the magazine provide writing and publishing opportunities during the pandemic lockdown, part of a broader scheme by Creative Victoria to save the arts sector when so many jobs and gigs completely disappeared for so many artists. ‘Poetry in Lockdown’ is one outcome of this—a standalone poetry special issue containing new work by twelve poets from across Australia. In commissioning these new works we imposed no theme on the poets. However, with the pandemic as background to all our lives, it is impossible not to read the poems in that context. Collating these poems has been a salve for us. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have.' (Publication summary)

'First books are a big occasion for poets. Their publication makes something heretofore unofficial official while announcing the poet as one committed to ‘the art of language’, as Gig Ryan describes poetry. Their publication chronicles and makes tangible the labour of what is often a long time—of feeling out, of experimentation—for writers attempting to find a voice, a language, even as they’ll discover post-publication that finding voice and language is a forever concern. And so, kudos to Rabbit Poetry Journal and its Rabbit Poets Series imprint, which publishes slim first books, often strong selections of poetry by emerging poets who might not otherwise have had such an opportunity in the frankly saturated Australian poetry scene. I’m not saying there are too many poets—if only there was more poetic, lateral thinking in the public sphere—but in terms of a market, it’s a positive sign when first books in particular are given space and attention.' (Introduction)

'Where Only the Sky had Hung Before disassembles and reassembles language found in the textual wastelands of the internet and the literary canon. Across many spectrums, from slippery lists of factoids to indices of figurative language, from a pantoum of #staywoke tweets to deep cuts and collage treatments of The Waste Land, The Argonauts, and The Left Hand of Darkness, these poems mobilise tensions and continuities between form and fluidity, gender and genre, literature and spam, childhood and adulthood, the virtual and the real.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.