'In Fog the promising, high-spirited young Nick Mangos of Fitzroy Raw is a loner in his late-fifties with signs of failing memory. Wanting to dispel a sense of growing unease, Nick sets out on a foggy night and finds himself, candle in hand, wandering through Fitzroy in search of his boyhood home. He encounters an assortment of vivid characters – rappers, squatters, an arsonist, a graffiti artist, gamblers, sex workers, homeless folk, and people from his past – all of whom are in some way touched by the flame and who further his journey. Through adventure and misadventure his candle is responsible for a fire, a Molotov cocktail, a suspected bomb, which result in a police hunt. Meanwhile, news reports depict Nick as an arsonist, a mad bomber, a terrorist. Mixing pathos and humour, blurring past and present, fusing real and surreal, Fog is a modern-day parable, a long night’s journey toward light, a lost soul’s quest for meaning and homecoming.' (Publication summary)

'COVID-19 has fractured society and dislocated lives, forcing us to work differently, question ingrained assumptions, and appreciate relationships precisely because we’ve been masked and socially distanced. In his new book of poems, Tom Petsinis focuses on the day-to-day experiences of lockdown and isolation to produce a collection of vivid snapshots that draw on memory, home, religion, mathematics, football and funerals. He has crafted poems that are sometimes whimsical, often elegiac, but always immediate and palpable, expressed in a language that speaks to all.

'One of the more disturbing effects of COVID-19’s prolonged lockdown has been the sense of becoming a stranger to one’s own life. The poems in Tom Petsinis’ Isolation overcome this feeling of estrangement by offering, with consoling precision, a rich (sometimes deeply moving and sometimes very funny) collection of observations of this new life of ours – from the new meaning of work, to face masks crafted by a mother/maker, to the poem ‘Wars’ in which the poet’s parents found ‘solace through closeness’ when their country was invaded, while the present invader distances us from family and friends.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Set in Fitzroy and spanning the turbulent 1960s, Fitzroy Raw lays bare the experiences of an immigrant boy from the age of six to sixteen. Arriving in Australia from Macedonia, young Nick Mangos finds himself in a complex and challenging world. He must accept a ‘stranger’ as his father, negotiate old customs and hostilities, learn a third language, and come to terms with the realities of his working-class environment.

'Each new formative experience – a dramatic wedding at the Fitzroy Town Hall, the discovery of body parts in the Edinburgh Gardens, an afternoon watching a football game at the Brunswick Street Oval, a life-changing visit to the Fitzroy Library – is registered with freshness and clarity.

'The novel is also a ‘hallowing’ of Fitzroy, as one familiar location after another is given a name, a cast of real and unforgettable characters, and a chain of significant cultural and emotional associations.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'In this book of poetry Tom Petsinis responds to a series of steles (marble gravestones), which the Ancient Greeks set up in memory of departed family members. His admiration of these remarkable works began in his youth, and now, in his maturity, it has been channelled into the present collection. At a time when sculptors were creating larger-than-life gods and goddesses in all their ethereal splendour, the same chisels, still warm with divinity, depicted humanity at its most vulnerable, in homely scenes tender and serene. The poet enters each stele and captures the pathos and restrained sorrow in verse that’s equally constrained, yet moving in its melancholy lyricism. His poetry is that of the telling detail: hands clasping in farewell, an inclined profile, a presented jewellery box, a dove pressed to the chest – gestures that says so much about love, loss and letting go.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Fourteen-year old Ivan is mathematically gifted and obsessed with gaming. Excelling in on-line war games, he falls behind in his studies, withdraws from family and friends, and is manipulative in satisfying his obsession. A mysterious, on-line exchange introduces him to equipment that enhances the gaming experience. Through ivan, his mirror image, he embarks on a quest for the secret of Quaternia, a virtual world where mathematical ideas come alive. With each session on the compelling equipment Ivan becomes less communicative, more introverted, while his avatar becomes more human.

'Alarmed by the sight of his son being reduced to a shell, Ivan’s father sets out to uncover the identity of the person behind the dangerous game. His detective work leads to a startling revelation, which he must come to terms with in order to save his son from being syphoned into the virtual ivan.' (Publication summary)

'In Breadth for a Dying Word, his seventh collection of verse, Tom Petsinis shifts his focus from the domain of personal history that produced the award-winning Four Quarters (a ground-breaking collection based entirely on Australian Rules Football) and the emotionally charged My Father’s Tools. In this new collection the first-person singular is subsumed by an indeterminate you. The second-person perspective blurs the boundary between author and reader, positioning the latter at the centre of each poem. Through the curious, reflective, questioning you the reader is taken on a journey in search of the original verb, the elusive fourth tense, new metaphors for death, sounds capable of animating matter, and, beyond this, to the very limits of language where reason yields to music and paradox.

'The poems in Breadth for a Dying Word are subtle but accessible, meditative yet playful, affirmative despite their often existential tone. Where poetry of this kind runs the risk of dissolving in abstraction, this collection is grounded in the particular, holding fast to the trinity of echo–image–metaphor.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Salonika Bound' 'links Thessaloniki (Salonika) during WWII and Melbourne some fifty years later. Salonika was for centuries a multicultural city with a large number of Christians, Muslims and Jews, the latter driven there from Spain in the fifteenth century. A play about love and jealousy, guilt and redemption, it also resonates with the life-affirming power of music drawn from Greek Rembetika and Jewish Sephardic traditions.'

Source: La Mama Theatre website, http://www.lamama.com.au/
Sighted: 05/08/2010