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A. Frances Johnson A. Frances Johnson i(A91173 works by) (a.k.a. Amanda Johnson)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 y separately published work icon Twenty Years of the Porter Poetry Prize Judith Beveridge , A. Frances Johnson , Damen O'Brien , Sara Saleh , Alex Skovron , Judith Bishop , Southbank : Australian Book Review, Inc. , 2023 26766341 2023 single work podcast

'This week on the ABR Podcast we celebrate twenty years of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize with readings from six winners. We invited these poets to reflect on the prize and their winning poems. Hear fresh readings from Judith Beveridge, A. Frances Johnson, Damen O’Brien, Sara M. Saleh, Alex Skovron and Judith Bishop. The 2024 Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, closes on October 9.' (Introduction)

1 Painted Weather i "Your meteorology app fails and you turn", A. Frances Johnson , 2023 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June no. 454 2023; (p. 51)
1 I Want/Don't Want a Place A. Frances Johnson , 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: Best of Australian Poems 2022 2022; (p. 75)
1 Zoom i "The camera veers", A. Frances Johnson , Anthony Lynch , 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 79 no. 3 2022; (p. 133-134)
1 3 y separately published work icon Save As A. Frances Johnson , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2021 23214753 2021 selected work poetry

'In A. Frances Johnson’s Save As, poetries of disfigurement braid tropes of ruin: land and country, self and community.

'Shunning earnestness and sanctimony, this distinctive ‘writing after nature’ offers deprecatory wit and an arsenal of intertextual and parodic free-verse techniques. An aluminium can narrates its own lifecycle, speaking of unchecked corporate extraction of aquifers; the Wikipedia entry for ‘Water’ is reframed in past tense, the vital chemical as pure remembrance in a dry world. Donne’s iconic ‘The Sunne Rising’ is retold with a factor 50 smile and more than a gentle nod to an overheated world. Keats’s lakeside withered sedge in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is transplanted to a tired pink lake under Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge. Among these politically playful poems, moving personal elegies are interspersed. These, too, are subtly implicated in ecological crisis; the mourning subject is always part of a bigger picture.

'These poems eschew one-note, passivity-inducing, melancholic lamentation, and invite self-identification and self-critique. Boldly wrestling with the long-armed tradition of modern pastoral romanticism, the collection’s poetic and personal ‘dross scapes’ show urgent engagement with ecological ruin and ecologies of grief.

'Johnson’s compelling poetic agitprop attests that one cannot die of landscape, but one can die of despair over loss of country and home. In demolishing ‘landscape’ and ‘poetries of the natural world’, these poems invite us to confront the real while acknowledging mythic artifice.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 Coal and Meter i "The poet digs down a decade", A. Frances Johnson , 2021 single work poetry
— Appears in: Griffith Review , April no. 72 2021; (p. 255)
1 Jobs for Women : Annunciate i "She won't go easily, two great wings", A. Frances Johnson , 2021 single work poetry
— Appears in: Island , no. 161 2021; (p. 12-13)
1 Gramsci’s Pig i "One day in the prison orison yard, you saw a pig arrested", A. Frances Johnson , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Journal , vol. 10 no. 1 2020; (p. 56-57)
1 Thirty Pieces i "You hang, peerless, around the edges", A. Frances Johnson , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Island , no. 159 2020; (p. 40-41)
1 The Poem After Forests i "Take the Wikipedia entries for 'forest' and 'water'", A. Frances Johnson , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Rabbit , no. 29 2020; (p. 95-96)
1 1 My Father’s Thesaurus i "You drove faultlessly until sundown.", A. Frances Johnson , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , January / February no. 418 2020; (p. 53)
1 The Art : Ultramarine i "There's always art, they tell you. You look blank. It's an art.", A. Frances Johnson , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Empathy : Poems from the 2018 ACU Prize for Poetry 2018; (p. 32-33)
1 You See : Romantic i "You see, Keats found breath at line's end", A. Frances Johnson , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Empathy : Poems from the 2018 ACU Prize for Poetry 2018; (p. 30-31)
1 Ring in i "I collect your wedding rings in a rainy satellite town of failing industry", A. Frances Johnson , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Anthology 2018; (p. 67)
1 What Rubbish A. Frances Johnson , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , May vol. 8 no. 1 2018;

'As Australian poet John Kinsella has observed, ‘There is plenty of room for misunderstanding forms’. Alongside Kinsella, and sounding deceptively like a modern poetry critic rather than a vital materialist philosopher, Jane Bennett considers forms of nature, ethics and human affect to propose that we ‘turn the figures of “life” and “matter” around and around, worrying them until they start to seem strange, in something like the way a common word when repeated can become foreign nonsense sound’.'  (Introduction)

1 2 y separately published work icon Rendition for Harp and Kalashnikov A. Frances Johnson , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2017 14566212 2017 selected work poetry

'This new collection extends themes taken up in The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street (2012). Environmental degradation and theme park notions of the natural endure. Accordingly, these poems reflect with tenderness, anger and irony on the ways humans chronicle, construct and war upon their natural environments. ‘Rendition’ puns on the idea of a song lyric, translation, surrender and also torture. In the anti-pastoral, anti-war poems offered here, groups of human beings and individuals are also shown as either tragically marginalized, lost or held too close. Cautionary ecocritical threnodies splice with personal elegies and historical cultural reflections to suggest a world awash with maladies of different kinds, as if to say that human beings must recalibrate love, death, survival and history as matters of urgency.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Greenfield Development i "The white farmer takes a piece of flat earth to market", A. Frances Johnson , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Best Australian Poems 2017 2017; (p. 95)
1 Poetry After the Epic : Migratory Prose/questing Poetics A. Frances Johnson , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , October no. 46 2017;

'This essay offers an exegetical reflection on research that underpinned poems drafted over a six-month period. For a recent writing residency at the Australia Council BR Whiting Studio in Rome, I devised a prose poetry project critiquing the often negative representational politics of recent global population movements into southern Italy. I researched the Italian political context and undertook field trips in order to evoke the influx of refugees and asylum seekers into Italy’s urban centres. The challenge was to portray individual human stories in poetical yet ethically activated ways in relation to depictions of others. This essay therefore explores what ‘counter-framing’ (Maley 2016: 193) of journeys and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers might be possible through the contemporary ‘voice’ of the prose poem. How might the prose poem, over and above, or in tandem with, other poetic modes, enact poetic and political counterframing of people movements?' (Publication abstract)

1 The Gearing i "When the riding boy fell hard,", A. Frances Johnson , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Island , no. 150 2017; (p. 24-25)
1 Fuse i "Wire was once a useful thing.", A. Frances Johnson , 2016 single work poetry
— Appears in: Writing to the Wire 2016; (p. 84)
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