AustLit

'The poems and non-fiction collected in Sputnik’s Cousin rinse, relent and tumble in the slipstream of modernity. The indefatigable nature of objects – how they reverberate in the proximity of others and become polished from anachronistic histories retold – hum a progress charged by humanity’s witless pursuit of technology and civility. MacCarter’s poetry is a menagerie of Rube Goldberg contraptions; invoking idiom, definition, and refraction while harnessing the slope, speed and gravity of language to set in motion these absurdist machines. A light switch is turned off, but not by means of a flick: it took fracking in Russia, the building of a sand castle and a monastic jeep to do so. These are maximalist poems whose syntax is coerced through yoga ... poems of humour, warning and visceral sound.' (Publication summary)