AustLit

'A poetry collection which is part criticism, part autobiography, and always acute in its recollection of the emotions inspired by television drama

'In her new collection Television, award-winning poet Kate Middleton considers the emotional impact that television programs had on her formative years ― from childhood cartoons Astro Boy and Roadrunner to series like Pretty Little Liars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills 90210. These were ‘the shows I watched to cry, to feel/ the hot gash angst of teenaged-ness’. In poems that expand like mini-essays, the poet explores the feelings evoked by these shows, the shame and longing, the regret and desire, and the different kinds of identification they encouraged, especially in a teenage girl. But the focus is also on the poet as an adult, thinking back over her adolescent responses, about the ways in which television plays with time and reality, and the extent to which its jumble of images reflects her own multi-faceted consciousness, if it hasn’t in fact formed it ― ‘the one whose interests are too voluminous, the one who tries/ to write deeply into one idea and is instead immediately/ tugged sideways…I try to do too much and/ my attention shatters, ricochets among ruins’.' 

'Sometime late morning it begins, a root of something that only as it grows do you recognise as pain. You have had coffee, as you do every morning, and now you feel the kind of heaviness that sends you to lie down. At home, the friend who is staying with you, whom you half invited and who may have misinterpreted your keenness for company, notes your early return and approves of your plan to retreat. For both of you it has been a year frantic with change and learning and emotion, and even if it is likely indulgent – so what, you’ve earned the right to call a morning off the books and instead take a heat pack and wish it were night all over again. She even microwaves the heat pack for you. You take it to bed where you think you will read or watch television or luxuriate in some way.' (Introduction)

'When S. and I started to talk, the directions were endless, and sympathetic. What passed between us, over coffee and chai, in emails, in text messages, were the names of authors, books, artists. We were both mapping, many cartographies laid over each other, human and non-human. Struck by the ways the same ground could be covered again and again, never fully covered, uncovered, recovered. The Shards.' (Introduction)

'Bella Li’s Argosy offers readers a book of real adventure: the adventure of form, and a challenge to our sense of what shapes a narrative. This work is fundamentally hybrid: amid short texts and textual sequences that may be termed prose poems, or micro-essays, or short short fictions, Li intersperses works of collage and photography. These visual elements of the work are not supplemental or separate, but are themselves linked to its central narratives. The whole book takes its cues from the collage novels of Max Ernst; his Une semaine de bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage and The Hundred Headless Woman provide the titles for the two sequences presented in Li’s work. At the same time that she draws upon Ernst, however, Li offers significant reconfiguration of surrealistic working methods. Where Ernst accompanied his collage images with captions – producing a text that bears a relation to the contemporary graphic novel – Li offers discrete segments of pure visual narrative, followed by sections of the work in which only text appears. The full-colour reproduction of this work makes for a lush object, which reminds us how central the ability to dwell with pictorial work has been in the history of reading. The interplay between the visual and verbal work provides a dimensionality that would be difficult to achieve through text alone, allowing critique to emerge in the friction between the two. These are works that are informed by postcolonial and feminist thought: they do not provide disquisition upon these topics, but offer instead an imaginative inhabitation of these ways of seeing the world.' (Introduction)

'Middleton reintroduces the reader to the world, to the strange and familiar, in ways that stay on, dwelling in the imagination with a sense of something akin to obsessive reverence. Jo Langdon, Mascara Literary Review

'Kate Middleton’s third poetry collection continues her preoccupation with terrestrial and other landscapes, both real and imagined. The poems haunt, and are haunted by, the legacies of literature and history: whether inhabiting the scientific laboratory, the exploratory voyage, the layered history of landscape, or the voices of past authors, they are interested in the border-zones of understanding, in both the ‘the riddle of untrodden land’ and the buried history of lost empires. Formally, the poems move between traditional lyric and collage-style forms of quotation and erasure. Others take a speculative turn away from the book’s historical grounding, such as in the sequence of poems titled ‘Watching Science Fiction’ that are scattered throughout the book. Passage traces an imaginative path through orientation and disorientation, where a god in the form of a lion and rabbits with eyes ‘fantastically in bloom’ surprise and enchant at every turn. It observes the world under a watchful gaze, ‘Patient as an avalanche.’' (Publication summary)