A group of aimless young blokes from the suburbs of Sydney go troppo in 1980s North Queensland as all around them, men fuelled by the resources boom tear up the landscape with abandon. If Jack Kerouac had been Australian he might have come up with something like North, a tale of Australian masculinity searching for itself, while learning that we need to tread softly on the land if we are to have any sort of a future.
wbo will become the pitch and cadencethe seven-eight count of unstoppable sadness?(from 'trees', p35)written 2008 to 2022, these poems in six parts (each part a ount) dive beneath the endless swells of love and grief that break over us like music or the rapid beating of our heartshere, the missing seventh count is imagined: caesura; break; breathe
'Decades of experience inform Hologrammatical - Philip Salom's new book is full of intricate, dazzling, and defiant poems.' - Toby DavidsonPhilip Salom's major new collection explores human and natural existence - as life-force and loss, and for diverse symptoms of achievement and folly. His intense scrutiny gives air to the unavoidable complexity of voices raised and voices ignored. Whether it's injury and mortality (our own) or disturbance and urgency (our climate), Salom uses a subtle insight and a restless, inventive wit to create interweaving fugues through time and memory. Within this, his fifteenth collection, the KGB might even read a brilliant taxonomy of their leader with enough alarm to ensure the poet is fed calming tea. But these are serious times, and these poems are meditative acts of witness.
Within this robust and delicate collection, Morgan Yasbincek simultaneously explores and invokes a constellation of poetic voices that all, ultimately, resolve into the nothing which gives them birth. Presence gives way to absence and absence hints at something beyond a restoration of presence, something her poems take seriously and ground through disruption, 'the vowels of silence', and the truth of life, lived, grieved and continued.Ever becoming, and eternally un-becoming, this intimate and sensual collection brings us close to tongues which become plants, daughters who unfold through Ancient Hindu plays and verdant landscapes which are forever speaking of the stillness beyond all things. All is animate, all have voices here, even in the silence and darkness of separation and loss. With Sappho as compañera and the Fragment pointing to what always is, Morgan's crafting of words awakens a world we have always known and always failed to name.
I want to say that Ouyang Yu plays with language, but he doesn't: what he does is recognise that language plays with us. This digressive, almost hallucinatory narrative unites Ouyang Yu's abiding obsessions: identity, history, cultural hypocrisy, race, the nature of storytelling. How do we approach a story as loose as life - one that will honour the messiness of life lived in what cannot help being both its first and final draft? All the Rivers Run South is about the work of addressing oneself to history, to a history that cannot be told in one way (something which might also be said of Ouyang Yu's own work). It recalls something Javier Marías said about fiction that in it, material truer than history is made available to us. The author creates history, giving us life as it is lived, and the struggle to make sense of that - as personal history, as geopolitical history - while remaining open to serendipity and to the death, figurative as well as literal, of the author, constituting history's only guaranteed warrant. Ouyang Yu provides comfort for the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. All the Rivers Run South is a salve and salvo for anyone who has ever thought, with Calderón, that "man's greatest crime is to be born." - Declan FryDuring the past thirty years the award winning writer Ouyang Yu has created the most challenging and innovative body of work this country has ever seen. The powerful energy of his genius, the rich stream of ideas and innovation in his poetry and novels, and in his essays and translations is evident in everything he writes, and never more so than in his enthralling new novel, All the Rivers Run South. For those interested in the exchange of ideas between Chinese and Australian culture, familiarity with Ouyang's work is essential. - Alex Miller
When Helen Hayward had her two children in London, 25 years ago, she found looking after them easy. Loving and looking after her kids was straightforward. However loving and looking after her home was not. She had long been instructed to put her career first. So she did. Yet what to do with the mushrooming laundry by the bathroom door? And what about if she actually liked cooking? Home Work is a series of personal essays motivated by three questions.Is there an art to running a home?Can it be a satisfying thing to do?Has the work we do around the home - which accounts for roughly a 1/4 of our waking hours - something important to teach us about life itself?
One River is a series of haibun studies of the Hunter River and its tributaries. Haibun is a Japanese poetic form of prose punctuated by haiku. In this instance, the longer, but still brief, Korean sijo are employed as lively sketches of the birds, trees, weather and waterways encountered in the author's wanderings. The heart of this book are unique meditations on the river and its hinterland. In their whimsical complexity - and leaps of imagination - they are an immersive experience, inviting the reader to find flow in the limber movements of water falling.
The Interpretation of Cakes is like no other novel you have ever read and is one novel that you will never forget.It's 1916 and Isaak Brodsky has inherited his family's patisserie in the Jewish quarter of Budapest. Here, in the midst of shelves overcrowded with marvellous, mouth-watering cakes, Isaak discovers that offering his customers the right cake leads to their psychological growth and his own. And so, the twentieth century science of Cake-analysis is born.This novel brings Budapest's cafés, streets and people to life in a charming, joyous and irresistible romp through the beginnings of psychotherapy and the mysteries of the conscious and unconscious mind. Thinking, and indeed, eating cake, will never be the same again.Allan Tegg was born in Newcastle, NSW. He spent his twenties working on Aboriginal communities in central Australia and the Kimberley. He now lives in Sydney. The Interpretation of Cakes is his first novel.
A wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to our bones, our psyches, our flesh. A Japanese soprano has lost her voice and seeks repose on a sailing boat in Corsica. A South African advertising executive learns the ropes at his Accra office. Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. Lovers meet, fade, delude. We are weak and defiant beings, ever-learning, ever-lustful.Fine stories, rank with exotic air, bursting like old fruit. - Bruce PascoeMcNamara's work has a fierce, vital beat, her stories robust yet finely worked, her voice striking in its confidence and originality. She writes with sensuous precision and a craft that is equally precise. This is fiction that can stand up in any company. - Hilary Mantel
The Dilemma of Writing a Poem is divided into three parts: poetica, political poems, and mother earth poems. The book as a whole examines the interrelatedness of these three areas, drawing upon the author's own experiences of imprisonment and torture by Chile's Pinochet regime. This is committed, political poetry at its best.
How could other parents understandshe can't regulate, can't dress, screams in wind?Their girls touch down, their modules steady, small footstepsbreaking the moon-sand's surface, their milestonescosmic miracles of the ordinary. We longfor their basic okayness, their assumptionthat the whole team will walk on the moon,get to jump, twirl in the applause, treasure the video.With her characteristic heart and power, the winner of the Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry turns her attention inward in this new poetry colleciton, creatively illuminating her own hidden autism and that of girls and women, most of whom are misdiagnosed and unsupported in a medical system designed for boys. Every page will surprise and move you.
If Cooke's previous book, Lyre, urged us towards the 'more' of the more-than-human world, then The grass is greener over your grave returns to the 'human' end of that spectrum - though always with an eye to the porosity of the human and its immersion in waves of land, language, dream, and sea. Typically wide-ranging in form, this new collection develops Cooke's preoccupations with colonisation, ecology, metaphysics, and travel, while also acknowledging their heritage in the life and work of the late poet Martin Harrison.
Saeed has not returned to Iran after publishing his novel The Imaginary Narrative of a Real Murder for fear of political persecution. He is surprised when Ismael, his father who has never left Iran, announces that he is travelling to Adelaide to visit him. During his short stay, Ismael tells Saeed the story of his unrequited love for Forugh Farrokhzad - the most controversial poet of modern Iran. The story makes Saeed see his father in a new light, and leaves him with the burning question: had his father, unwittingly, played a role in Forugh's death?
Michael Sharkey lives in Castlemaine, Victoria. Former teacher of literature and rhetoric, he is sceptical about the language of persuasion. As Augustine said, 'I have encountered many who want to deceive, but no one who wants to be deceived.'
"A marvellous debut, fierce and tender. Alex McInnis explores the burdens of generations, the secrets and whispers, the sorrows and horrors of the past with breath-taking beauty, honesty and poignancy. Every word is perfect." - Grace KarskensAlex McInnis (she/her) is a writer living on Gadigal land, working with written forms to explore ideas of family, friendship, labour, time and stories that subvert accepted histories and futures. She has been shortlisted for the Overland Fair Australia Prize, and was awarded the NSW Institute of Journalists' Prize for Literature in 2021.
AfterLife was shortlisted in the 2021 Dorothy Hewett awards. The judges had this to say about the manuscript:Even the titles thrum, so that the index reads like a suite of small poems. Kathryn Lomer's is a house with many rooms, Wunderkammers all, filled with curious objects drawn from the worlds of art, science, nature, love, life, death... everything. Supple lines and sensitive rhythms make surprising conjunctions, often leading us from the smallest detail of a beloved's body to an erotics of the cosmos. Lomer's music shows us what it means to live a life of poetry.
It might be that Madame de Lafayette's novel of passion is one of the greatest in the genre. It is closer to the declamatory theatre of Racine than to anything else in the robust tradition of the English novels of Fielding or Smollett or Dickens. It has generated in John Watson a response in iambics, which seem in English the only way this expressive grandeur can be attempted. Watson has in the past been drawn similarly to the ancient texts of Daphnis and Chloe and Tristan, where passion is also the currency. Princess de Clèves may well be his most sustained success.
If, as has been said, Sant is "an important, innovative poet" with a "penetrating eye for the hidden geometries of meaning" it is because, whatever his subject, the vision it draws out of him is there to be his and the subject, like the insight, has come as naturally to him as leaves are to trees.- Elizabeth Knottenbelt, AgendaAndrew Sant writes intellectually compelling and formally taut poems ... made possible when an exceptional facility with language collides with everyday subjects.- Brian Henry, Poetry Nation Review
Empty Dresses is Julie Chevalier's first poetry collection in a decade. The title poem is one of many ekphrastic poems, in this case inspired by Anselm Kiefer's paintings.About her previous collections:...Chevalier's voice is also present in Darger, not only in the characteristic precision of her poetic images, but in the enjoyable fizziness of her play with language and line....Readers less familiar with the ins and outs of poetic language will certainly find her poems enjoyable and rewarding, but there are other subtleties to her work - her play with voice, line, music, image - that gratify careful and repeated reading.- Jessica L Wilkinson,Rabbit Interview, An Introduction to Julie Chevalier
Jill Jones is an omnivorous, attentive and exhilarating poet, admired for her seductive hauntings of urban experience and her playful rearrangements of language and page. Her work over the last three decades has fearlessly reckoned with the body and sexuality, place and the environment, the gamut of everyday life. Now, this long-awaited book showcases Jones' ambitious and resonant reworkings of the lyric, her dextrous and often witty extensions of experimental modes, her fresh cinematic eye, and her restless inventories of the planet's current disasters. Gathering work from her 13 previous volumes, plus more than 30 new poems, Acrobat Music is a major recasting of Jones' distinctive and invigorating contribution to contemporary poetry.
Lee Cataldi, born 1942, lives near Adelaide and has published three books of poetry. Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party, which won the Ann Elder memorial Prize, The Women who Live on the Ground, which won the Human Rights Award for Poetry, and Race Against Time which won the NSW Premier's Award for Poetry. She has worked as a field linguist on the Australian Languages, Warlpiri and Ngardi. She looks forward to the return of poetry as a major art form, being the most suitable for writing on walls with charcoal.
A woman starts out from a quiet corner of Glebe in Sydney towards the bustle of Broadway and Surry Hills, carrying with her the manuscript of a childhood friend who has recently died. Her thoughts surge between past and present as she strives to understand the effect of her friend's manuscript, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, has had on her. Not only does the manuscript remind her of what she might prefer to forget - youthful ambitions, an abandoned friendship, entanglements with religion and anorexia - it also ignites in her a creative impulse.
In a suburban Sydney pub, a woman tells her younger sister the story of how her life has changed since a serious car accident. She speaks of the blossoming of romance, the rediscovery of her long dormant creativity: her ability to draw. And yet an exhibition comes to nothing, a lover is abandoned. She leaves everything behind. In the driving monologue of her own narrative, the younger sister attempts to make sense of her life and the events and thoughts that have obsessed the elder since the accident.
A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father's house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn't reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complicatioins that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her - a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.
A Double Act draws upon various intoxicating books - Airborne Dogs, Nutters Without Fetters, Poems of Relative Unlikelihood, their verse novel The Ferrara Poems - later filmed - and The Gutman Variations, a study of Lacan.Warning: will produce exhilaration, euphoria, general systemic excitation, scorn, weeping, laughter. Parodic, yet intense - poems terse, thoughtful, complex or pellucid, philosophical, and not unacquainted with beauty, but always sharp, always funny - A Double Act."Due perhaps to their collaborative nature there is a remarkable freedom from anxiety here. But a deal of intelligence." - Stephanie Trigg, Island"Lucid, breathtakingly, drastically reductive - like Weil, like Brecht - caring and bare-knuckled, canny and guileless, winsome and ruthless - I love these guys!" - Suzy Treister, Frieze magazine
Moon Wrasse is a voyage through transformation and disenfranchised grief: parenthood ambivalence, queer infertility, gender transition from the perspective of a life partner; a navigation of identity in a time of climate crisis. It is also a love song to reading in the dialogic tradition of the lyric mode. Alert to questions of intersubjectivity and 'what shapes us' these poems arise from encounters with Australian and international poets, contemporary philosophy and science, music and ecological non-fiction. These are poems that speak back, speak to, read with and whisper alongside; that seek to sing the emergent self into being. They are deeply engaged with the notion that we are shaped by the voices around us as well as those we carry within.
It is 1977 and Kate is a seventeen-year-old HSC student from Sydney's North Shore. She has dreams of becoming the next Ita Buttrose and being the editor of Cleo. Yet the 1970's free love and peace vibe has not yet hit Kate's suburban home in Beecroft. Kate's carefree behaviour leads her parents to seek the advice of Doctor Jack Grafton, a maverick psychiatrist. Kate is subsequently subjected to Slumber Therapy where she is given a cocktail of drugs that leave her confused about what is real. The second part of the novel witnesses the decline of Grafton who claimed he could cure all mental illness, after multiple deaths of his patients. After Jack's suicide, a bereaved fellow psychiatrist attempts to tell the story of his sharp-minded gregarious friend and defends his increasingly irrational behaviour in the lead-up to his death.Like Puberty Blues for the mirror side of the harbour.- Keri GlastonburyA confronting puzzle that startles with its sharp, vivid enactment of a tragedy of human innocence caught in the grip of a kind of blithe corruption.- Carmel Bird, author of The White Garden
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