AustLit

'The writing that follows arose from states of joy, anguish, ambivalence and contemplation. The poems come from a period of ten years, while other poetic, essayistic and diaristic pieces were produced with intensity over a shorter duration.

'Not long ago we humans began to share typed and contained expressions – whimsical, crass, artful, profound, wounded – instantly and with a large audience, through an expanding web of fibre optics. The poems straddle the rise of networked and relatively indiscriminate platforms for communication: some were produced before their rise, and fed by silence, while others were produced after, and fed by the ghost crackle of digitised speech.

'The prose poems and prose all come from after, but from a period within the after when I’d left the main conduits. At the outset of my asceticism, I found I had a compulsion to communicate to a wide audience. I sought to satisfy this compulsion, which I’d never felt so strongly, and began sending letters to myself by email, with a changing group of people as BCC recipients. As I wrote I felt I was consciously or unconsciously blending an older, poetic address – Eliot’s ‘I’ talking to itself or to nobody in particular – with recent communicative impulses. This seemed to create new possibilities for what the poem could be, and what it could enter into, as a form of mediated performance.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'It is twenty years since Night Song and Other Poems was published. That was a poetic recording of my journey from childhood, through adolescence, marriage and a return to Australia from twelve years in Aotearoa New Zealand. The foci in that book – identity, family, childhood – were deliberately occluded. My sexuality, in the 1980s of its writing, was presented as though I was at the time a straight man coming to terms with my Wiradjuri heritage. I skirted around Aboriginal politics and identity.

'No more. The journey continues in this book and I, as tour guide, take you to unvisited, secret places that were definitely not seen to be acceptable or proper to visit in the past. The Mabo judgement informed much of my thinking in Night Song and there is no doubt that the same-sex marriage debate of 2018 and its outcome inform these poems. They are less tentative and far more certain in my expression of Aboriginal and sexual identity and acceptance.

'My real life experiences are here – expressed guts and all – far more honestly than before, and hang the consequences in the open. For me, wholly healthy. A long-time friend has often said, ‘It’s amazing how death changes you.’ Not living authentically has been a living death for me. Like the Ancient Mariner, I have unshackled multiple albatrosses from my being, and have finally blessed all those facets of myself once believed to be slimy, ugly and at all costs to be avoided. The Murrumbidgee is a river I was born next to … and now, seventy and more years later, am returned to.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'We find ourselves in love or out of it; in a friendship but with an enemy; under contract; inscribed by the law; giving birth; accompanied by ghosts; making pacts; in pursuit of a lost object; oriented towards new and unknown attachments.

'We find ourselves in a relation, even when that relation is broken or non-reciprocal.

'This book is about relations and their ambiguous intimacies. The three poems approach the question of how to endure, survive, destroy or protect the relationships that both constrain and make life possible.

'I wrote these poems while reading the work of Andrew Brooks, Brandon Brown, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Silvia Federici, Elena Gomez, Stefano Harney, Saidiya Hartman, C L R James, Fred Moten, Jordy Rosenberg, Hortense Spillers, Wendy Trevino and Frank Wilderson III. The three poems that comprise this book are in debt to these thinkers and should be read as marginal notes to their ideas.

'One way to perceive relations is to study them intently and to construct a poetics in their shadow.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'As I write this, fires are burning out of control on Kangaroo Island and all along the east coast of Australia. Lives, homes, half a billion animals: gone. As I write this, I am awaiting a blood sunset, the kind that filters the land through a lens of pink, helping everything to complement the colour of my acrylic nails. As I write this, citizens of the USA (and the world) are holding their collective breath awaiting retaliation from the Iranian army in response to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. As I write this, I can tell the three avocados in the fruit bowl beside me will all ripen tomorrow morning. As I write this, I am wondering if I can afford to renew my gym membership and what will happen to my body if I don’t.

'As I write this, I question the necessity of a poem – written on and with and for atoms, spoken through waves – combustible, ephemeral, biodegradable. Each poem in this book exists in two forms, both inhabiting a unique state of decay or decomposition (perhaps re-composition?). How you choose to engage is entirely up to you. Read this book back to front, front to back, upside down, right way round. Start at the beginning, in the middle; breathe it in one word at a time. Use it as a doorstop, as Tinder, as rolling paper – but read it first if only to revel in its potential/futility.

'–Em König'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'The old hill near where I grew up was outwardly ruined: its pines were dead, its vines gone to seed and its sheds, which once held some purpose, sunk and rusted. With my immature logic I considered this place open and powerful, even though the land was enclosed by a wire fence and fallow from overcultivation and neglect. Like other places in the world, the traces of colonial settlement here held dull, sour feelings. The entire place seemed displaced from itself; maybe nothing could belong there.

'Writing these poems has something to do with being in lands like this. As a child that hill gave me my first feeling of personal privacy, even though it was open, even though it was fenced for someone else, and perhaps because the fence was there. The poems here express indignation at the eventual consequences of privacy. Yet, equally, privacy fascinates me. Equally, fences fascinate me – their lines, their tensions, their bending. I am not the first to say that poetry is a form of enclosure, but I want to say it here again, anyway. I love how permeable this form of enclosure can be. In the same way, I loved how the fence around that private hill would bend as I moved through it.

'–Lucy Van'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Held under an incorrect adverb, the slowness of this book is expressed as intransigent buffering and refusal of optimisation. A syrupy coherence runs through these poems; passing thoughts and bits of language stick to their surfaces. The book is shaped by a stubborn commitment to inclusive imprecision which seeks companionship with error and with the grit and offcuts we collect in the course of living.

'Objects of the industrial world are beheld in their strangeness and excess. An awareness of the hands, machines and historic forces that produce our material realities directs these poems, along with the attempt to understand that objects arrive with afterlives and consequences.

'Archive-shuffling was a useful model for writing, one that was connected to a desire to amplify minor histories and attend to the technologies of connection that wire, thread and beam us into the present. Voices drop out, a phrase is misremembered, the test pattern is the viewing event. If there’s static on the line it’s a happy bit of chance, an instructive interruption.

'A go-slow is a pointed withdrawal of effort, as well as a chance to cultivate pleasure in slackness. Does a state of continued slowness become atrophy? Perhaps this explains the instances of breakage and depletion. The poems in Slowlier are propelled by the oscillation between an acquiescence which can only wryly index decline, and the desire to use the poem to scaffold and energise activities that kick against the logic of inevitability.

'–Ella O'Keefe'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

‘Making the wings was a joyful process that continues my explorations of symmetry and asymmetry.’ — Catherine Vidler

'Created with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Paint, visual poet Catherine Vidler’s ‘wings’ — at once playful and ominous — multiply and develop across this enigmatic and wordless collection.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'My poems are visual representations of reading. In our culture, this activity is usually silent and optically complex. Conventional meanings are often simple compared to the actual signs and their contexts, which in turn are rarely exploited for poetic potential. My usual way of dealing with this seems simple in retrospect: I imagine the context of the linguistic event, and within that make one gesture. So: one sequence, one page, one word, one letter; often all of the ‘ones’ together. To work through an idea may take many separate gestures, producing something like variations.

'I have made poems using a range of materials: plastic letters, dry-transfer letters, sticky vinyls, MDF cut-outs; and methods: silk-screen printing, photocopying, mechanical and electric typewriters. Since the advent of the PC, most of my work is on the computer. The individual sequences in this book are usually printed on loose A4 pages, tucked into plastic folders. –Alex Selenitsch'

Source : publisher's blurb

''The only Sundays I looked forward to were spent with my beloved Australian nanna Kathleen Mary McCarthy. I would sit with Nanna McC — listening to her stories unwind — and watch her pickle onions and brew ginger beer for Sister Kate's fete. She always cared for unloved and unwanted orphans. She would send me out to play with them. I didn't understand that I was playing with stolen children. I used to think Nanna McC was a kind of saint. I knew she was sent into service as a domestic slave, but it was not until that moment I understood that she was a Bush Mary.' — Teena McCarthy' (Publication summary)

'Madrid, Spain 2019. The end of the UN Climate Change Conference--another moral failure on the part of those who could have made change. I go back to the labour union hall that all the activist groups have been using as a headquarters to help with the clean-up. There are only a few of us left. I take on the communal kitchen and bin heads of broccoli gone to dusty seed and half-used jars of slimy lima beans. I wash towers of greasy plastic cups with cold water and floor cleaner, because that's all there is. The door to the room that held the expensive sound equipment has been broken--no, not just broken, but thoroughly smashed. There is talk of a missing key, something lost in translation. The word 'smithereens' comes to mind.

'In a back room littered with cardboard and paint tins, I find a giant papier-mache head of a grandmother that First Nations activists fashioned for their part in the climate march. Alone in the echoing halls, it feels like silence and time are demanding something of me--an act of great care--though I don't know how to rise to it. The crisis is upon us, but abstraction is a bulwark; deafness, everywhere. We have come to an edge. I want to find a way of taking the truth into my body, and then putting it down into the ground. From somewhere offstage, a misery of voices starts to murmur in the scrounge. What starts up is a grief work. I wrap the grandmother head in a pall of plastic sheeting and carry it across the city to Desperate Literature bookshop in the rain.' (Publication summary)