'Purgatorio Re-placed is a re-write of Dante’s Purgatorio, the second book of his Divine Comedy. Using Dorothy Sayers’ translation as a guide, Alex Selenitsch keeps Dante’s overall and detail structure of 33 Cantos or chapters but rewrites the epic in modern Australian English. Dante’s medieval list of sins, his characters and events are replaced with Australian ones, while the mountain is flattened out to encompass the continent of Australia. Over this geography, the new poem deals with issues of art and creativity, and the development of a poetic voice.'

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

'Ten atmospheres is a graphic sequence that embeds the word atmosphere in a matrix of the alphabet. Ten letters in the word give ten pages; five have the word picked out vertically, five have it picked out horizontally. The colour sequence for the consecutive pages, and for consecutive letters in the word, is taken from the order of colours available in the modifiers of the word program. Although the patterns are visual, they are not pictorial. Instead of presenting a picture of atmosphere, the texts work on the usual convention of left to right flow, using memory and prediction as reading qualities. The reader is asked to experience what the word stands for through their reading, at the scale of the individual page and the scale of the set.' (Introduction)