AustLit

'With urban imaginaries and city-making in mind, and cognisant of the complicity of cities in socio-ecological crises, this paper responds to recent events in Melbourne and Sydney involving the expansion of certain powers to penalise the disadvantaged and homeless, and to clean up city streets. I discern in these events the material and discursive articulations of capitalist-colonial urban imaginaries. I go on to explore fiction’s capacities to resist these articulations and to affect the real, and the capacities in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, and Janette Turner Hospital’s The Last Magician to cultivate readers’ sense of cities as constantly varying, permeable assemblages, rather than as constantly improving, coherent, stable, secure organisms. These novels expand readers’ abilities to transform urban imaginaries and make cities differently.'  (Publication abstract)

'‘Quizas,’ she said. ‘Perhaps. It takes the subjunctive case.’
A light-bulb moment - of course it does. It expresses something uncertain, imagined, unreal with words like possibly, maybe or ‘once upon a time’. While some of the poems in this book were triggered by real events, others are pure imagination. Many have been presented within the folk scene, where poetry must be understandable and, hopefully, funny. Some are simple reporting of amazing, but real, events. Others stretch into the supernatural. Some pick up on the quirky, such as fortuitous misspelling or parody of the well-known. And, of course, there are poems of love and loss. In this volume you will find poems to make you laugh or make you cry, poems which will match your mood, or change it, and poems to simply relax with. ' (Publication summary)