AustLit

'Please excuse these pages. Every poem is a disaster and every poetic form is an insult to poetry, to proper measure and harmony. The tone is particularly off, and sometimes it seems like the author is the kind who presents ugliness as beauty and beauty as ugliness and everything is so loud and underlined until there is nothing that is not. What point is there in reading anything like that? Or, for that matter, in reading anything at all? Of Baudelaire’s prose poems, Turgenev advised, 'do not run through these poems one after the other: you will probably get bored – and the book will fall from your hands.' If only this collection were so poetic. Alas, these poems prowl around hoping to snag someone. And in such a distempered way, really, who could be moved by a single word or letter, especially when they’re tugging on your sleeve like a slavering dog. And that’s not the half of it. You will find these poems, or whatever they are, forced into an arrangement which is as false as any bouquet that has been idly ripped from nature, and already stinks as it lands in cellophane or a vase. Stinks of nothing but the history of prattle: poems, prose, writing, from Ovid to Beckett with many others stuck in between. So what – we all like pretending to be someone we are not. And these pages are written in the shadow of Echo, who rambled on and on, outlived Narcissus, outlived her own body, until she was only voice – a great, echoing voice, the parrot that is us, and which won’t go away.'

Source: Author's blurb.

'Horses have been intrinsic to much of human history. Their connection to human activities has always been dualistic but have also been constantly beset with ironies. Equine connections to human activities have always been dualistic: horses are linked with both deities and domestic drudgery; lauded as symbols of freedom and subservience; relied upon a vital means of transportation and agricultural labour, or considered a luxurious indulgence. In Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, artistic and literary representations of horses started a tendency towards the anthropomorphic, moving away from dead-eyed mechanical portraits. In the eighteenth century, romanticised portrayals of horses began a steady rise to primacy. Today, horses maintain a liminal position enjoyed by few animals: they are not quite pets, but not quite livestock. They are still working animals, but also easily replaced by machines or human athletes. Scientific knowledge of how to best raise, train and manage horses is flourishing, yet long cultures of anecdotes and training theories, grounded in highly subjective and often questionably founded interpretations of equine behaviour, reign supreme in many circles.

'Who is Romeo? He was not my horse. In life he was a symptom of all that is wrong with industrial-scale equine production. He fell victim to human interests in as many ways as it was possible to fall. Well-meaning ignorance is as dangerous as malice. Amongst horse people, this is also often called love.'

Source: Author's blurb.

'Paul Bowles said 'whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, but poetically so.' The poems here connect with nerves in bodies, pixels on screens, letters in words and the air’s water content. There are unwitting dialogues with texts gone before; texts that have floated into the spaces I travel – online, on a bookshelf, in a dream, a film, another country, on the television.

'I process them < > they process me.

'They mingle with the ways I experience social and political currents (somewhere between solid and liquid: despair and hope). I try things, and sometimes something happens.

'Now, these poems float in this book for you to process < > for them to process you.'

Source: Author's blurb.

'The first time I heard the word, I saw her diving. From the cliffs of Kuttawa, her long arc into the lake they flooded a town to create. A fever so verdant it calls you by name. The water was vaguely green-edged that summer. Some algal bloom, which never hindered my sister. I never jumped. Not then. Years later, the fever came for me, blind in her wake. It called me by her name.

'Poe said 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.' I don't want it to be true, but here we are. Every elegy needs an author. And then, an autopsy.

'In the decade after she died, my poetry became diagnostic, archaic, hysteric, mesmeric. This book is ossuary to a constellation of deaths, some sudden, all strange. It is also a catalogue of medical and mercurial oddities, curiosities that call forth the exquisite corpse hard at work beneath our living flesh. The echolalic duet between what is lost and what is left behind. The phantom limb. The wandering womb. The book bound in skin. The face that ghosts itself. The fever dream that ends in drowning. The writhing grace of speaking in tongues. The Holy Ghost, that only permissible husband in the unkempt dance of our girlhood. Home: our pale host to long winters and shared delusions, borne of boredom and endless grooming. The countless ways in which we coaxed our bodies into clothes and, later, coffins.

'This is what I know, now. It is never banal to watch someone unfurl.

Come in, won't you? The grass is fine.'

Source: Author's blurb.

'I once wrote to a poetry advice column because I was afraid of my emotions and the havoc they wreaked on me. I called them ‘a huge problem’ but Diana Hamilton responded: ‘Feeling pleasure is a legitimate way of developing as a person-writer!’

'We got a kitten and I tried to write poems for her. Or some other (many) times I had a thought and realised I shouldn’t say it out loud only to find myself speaking it. When these turned to poems. Could there be a poet in the sense of a hare or another graceful creature or perhaps bitter and less warm-blooded. Like endives.

'Or when you want to write poems for the world but … and maybe a museum exhibition about a colonial botanist who collected timber specimens.

'Joined a reading group with some people who turned out to almost all be poets we read Das Kapital volume 1 which stuck with me I think my communist spirit which was born that year was also part poet.

'It’s sometimes like a heat pack muscle relaxant & then you finally can read in bed in the evenings without checking on your cat.

'I’m afraid to share more because of what emotions have done to my poetry but you can read and devein them in your own time. There is a YouTube tutorial for it probably.

'Or full communism or how Amy De’Ath says ‘i wish for us another world where we might live freely … a world of dank memes and slick gifs’.

'–Elena Gomez' (Publication summary)

'Yuiquimbiang is part of an ongoing project to create an ecopoetic form that integrates political essay and environmental poetics: a project that evolved out of my double life as a poet and environmental activist. It was driven by a desire to develop a radical ecopoetic form that would effectively communicate Australia’s ecological crisis as encountered in two specific regions – East Gippsland and the Monaro – and enact an alternative inhabitation of the land.

'The series of mainly long-form texts in this collection is grounded in extensive walking, listening and research. A concomitant slow reading is encouraged. In the drafts, the work included detailed references that have been distilled here in the notes section at the end. I have spent decades attending to this place, and continue to search for a glimpse of the pre-European grasslands and forests and celebrate their rare survival. The work attempts to defy the continuing colonial violence that permits and supports the undoing of the land.

'‘Yuiquimbiang’ is the first recorded European mishearing/ misrepresentation of a Ngarigu word, written down by John Lhotsky in 1834 as the name of a Monaro run, which later became known as Eucumbene. The Eucumbene River, once referred to as the East Branch of the Snowy River, was excluded from the 2002 intergovernmental agreements to return environmental flows to the Snowy.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters writen by that teenage daughter – me – handed around family back home, disappeared. Yet letters from that mother to her teenage daughter – me – remained protected in my red life-journey suitcase. I carried them across time and landscapes as a mother would carry her baby in a thaga.

'In 1978–79, I was living in an Aboriginal girls’ hostel in the Bentley suburb of Perth, attending senior high school. Mum and I sent handwritten letters to each other. I was a small-town teenager stepping outside of all things I had ever known. Mum remained in the only world she had ever known.

'Nganajungu Yagu was inspired by Mother’s letters, her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture. A substantial part of that culture is language, and I missed out on so much language interaction having moved away. I talk with my ancestors’ language – Badimaya and Wajarri – to honour ancestors, language centres, language workers and those Yamaji who have been and remain generous in passing on cultural knowledge.

'–Charmain Papertalk Green'  (Publication summary) 

'This book has multiple fire exits. This book has too many keys. You can climb through a window into this book. Some of these poems are not on the lease, and you are willing to take it all the way to the Residential Tenancies Authority.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says ‘a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’. These poems ask what proofs of stability we build when our homes and selves are in perpetual flux.

After the Demolition is about rebuilding as much as it is about taking apart. It is about moving, and about moving on – what we leave behind, and what we attach more firmly to ourselves. When a place is gone – because we’ve given the keys back, or because the locks are lopped off – our attachment can drive us towards saudade, nostalgia, replication. We mythologise the flaws of our past haunts and past lives, and this determines the ways we start over when everything is air rights.'

Source: Author's blurb.

'Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. "Are you feeling helpless and angry? I am. I'm having a quiet rage against the material and immaterial machine. Thank you for holding me. This book is a shard of frustration. It's a place to process emotion. Angry and curious, I recently dived into some dark online spaces that I hope one day will be lost, and documented words and phrases used about and against women. I'm working with the concept of printing itself: its terminology and actions are historically drawn from the human body. As an experimental letterpress printer, I often use words to give paper a hard time, and the audience can usually witness the marks left by my processes. In this physical book I have had to think flatter, within the restrictions of contemporary digital print processes." Caren Florance' (Publication summary)