AustLit

'In Fat Chance, poet and publisher Kent MacCarter investigates variations on how non-fiction can be reported, taking an uncanny look into sole survivors of major airline crashes, a memoir approach at the surgical complication known as gossypiboma – where an instrument is left behind in a body cavity after surgery – a recount of marketing tactics for children's toys and more.

'Columns of justified prose lure you into the familiar channels of reporting facts; you could be mistaken for believing there is no poet or poetry here at all. Yet, the primary purpose of Fat Chance is not the transmission of information, and it thrives on contradiction. Contrary to the title's colloquial meaning, it offers you ample possibility. Here, the journalistic and the poetic collide to liberate language from truth so you can wander in the wide, bountiful space between.

'Emotion is denuded from the stories, forcing you to fill the void with your own suppositions and terrors ... rubbernecking at yourself on why you are uncomfortably allured. With its irony and absurdity dialled up to the sublime, you will be confronted by this feel-bad book of the year.' (Publication summary)

'On the roofs of windowless malls and advertising conglomerates, Kent MacCarter is dancing. Shimmy, bebop, pogo, he's climbing billboards to wall-flip up high over the parking lot, its asphalt vistas, naturalising heaps of disposable packaging, target markets heading to their cars under the power grid. He's making a maelstrom up there, sucking it all in-real maraschinos, Donkey Kong, nuclear reactors, fibromyalgia, quietude, cup-a-soups. It's 'draping sparkle on the troposphere'. It's giving the republic of letters its republic back. '& it's a total fucking gas'.

- Lisa Gorton

'Kent MacCarter is writing like no other poet. His post SF Renaissance and post-language new lyricism are all tussling with an Australian sense of edges. Transcultural and non-national, these poems rip through assumptions and leave us flabbergasted. A generative tension drives word deployment, with words making meaning, developing that 'genuine strangeness' that shifts poetic discourse into something differentiated, generative, essential. In MacCarter's work, the 'ordinary' becomes strange and a lens through which we might re-see our certainties. There's an accentual and cultural slippage grappling with the 'new' in interrogative ways that are beyond satirical-the poet inside and outside what is being critiqued, culpable and also stunned by what is seen. Inside, because he is a participant in the cultural debates and discussions of the modern, and outside because his language is so self-propelling that the poet follows in its wake, watching on. These critiques of commercial fetishisation and gender stereotyping/exploitation are politically and ethically driven challenges to us all, requiring us to question our own modes of reading. This is a riveting work-compulsive, committed and drop-jawed wondrous.

- John Kinsella
 

'Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that matter can cataclysmically implode, creating a state where a given density and the space-time curvature split towards infinite values. This is referred to as a singularity, or – as it is known to ordinary folk – a black hole. Extending out from a black hole’s unfathomably dense centre and extraordinary gravitational pull is a finite volume of space that ends in an event horizon: a demarcation – a line in the cosmic sands – from which nothing inside can escape: not rock, metal, Judas Priest, photons, alliteration or anything else. The closer that matter gets to a singularity, the more the laws of physics fail, eventually collapsing entirely.'  (Introduction)