AustLit

'About three-quarters through Acrobat Music: New & Selected Poems, Jill Jones nudges the reader knowingly in the ribs. ‘Difficult Poem’ proposes a list of possible definitions of what a ‘difficult poem’ might be, or might be assumed to be. Composed of only six lines, and nineteen words anagrammatically rearranged from its title, with an introductory subtitle, ‘(yeah like a’, it’s an ironic riposte to what has come back to Jones, as she told Jen Webb in a 2019 interview, ‘that my poetry is thought to be a bit “difficult”, for some reason I can’t quite figure out. Because it really isn’t difficult.’ Having read Acrobat Music, I wouldn’t disagree with her. And ‘Difficult Poem’ certainly hammers home the rousing, generative riffing of Jones’ approach.'  (Introduction)

'It’s no wonder Greek myths keep being modernised, when the times feel so consequential, riven with myriad disruptions caused by hubris and violation. Ekhō is the latest such retelling, a book-length poem in three sections by writer and artist Roslyn Orlando.' (Introduction)

'Π.O.’s two most recent books were epic in scope and heft. Fitzroy: The Biography was a sprawling history of the Melbourne suburb; Heide, a kaleidoscopic account of art-making and patronage. Both books wielded dizzying accumulations of disparate, sometimes incredible, facts and stories against monolithic authority.' (Introduction)   

'In the late 1980s, American nuclear-armed warships visit Perth, prompting impassioned protest from a wide array of people, including the narrator of John Kinsella’s verse novel Cellnight. After a brief prologue, they recall what they have seen and experienced. The waves of questions begin: “Who will / remember”. These rhetorical questions reverberate throughout the book and into the present.' (Publication summary)

'These days the line between dystopian and realist narratives feels increasingly blurred. The virtual world too now seems inseparable from the physical. The Exclusion Zone amply demonstrates that poetry is able to speak to these convergences.' (Introduction)

'The title of Lucy Dougan’s latest poetry collection quotes the surrealist artist Paul Nash, for whom the“monster field” is that “elusive and ubiquitous” place glimpsed in passing, which makes a profound impression but which cannot be easily found again.' (Publication summary)

'The pandemic isn't over. No matter how often we speak of it using the past tense, or how strong our quixotic nostalgia for 'how it used to be'. Despite how oddly clueless we are at assessing actual risk or how much we wish ourselves not to be one of the vulnerable, it persists as a background hum, or a piercing, unshakeable tinnitus. Plans have to change at short notice. Friends are bedridden for days, exhausted for weeks or months. The numbers of cases and deaths, now merely footnotes rather than headlines, continue whether we look at them or not.' (Publication abstract)

'Since her debut novel in 1999, Heather Rose has written astutely about the vulnerabilities of people and the sublime beauty of the natural world, particularly her home state of Tasmania. Her Stella Prize-winning The Museum of Modern Love used Marina Abramović’s performance The Artist is Present to explore love, loss and art-making. Bruny, Rose’s 2019 novel, took on international politics, protest and global capital, though it too was very much concerned with family, illness and the stories we tell.' (Introduction)

'In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart writes that the use of caesura or enjambment ‘bring[s] pulse and breath to the poem itself’, at the same time opening ‘the text to the excentric positions of unintelligibility and death’.' (Introduction)

'How does poetry deal with disability? At the level of theme and voice, Australian poetry – including the theorising and criticism of it – has rarely given overt priority to disabled experience. This essay seeks to contribute to a correction of this neglect by adapting the philosophical approach of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the phenomenological preeminence of the Other. It considers how disability – defined expansively as a bodily otherness which also implicates the self – might become apprehended not only within thematic content, but through the disruptions of poetic form.' (Publication abstract)