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Alexis Late

Alexis Late is a Western Australian writer and reviewer. She studied English literature and History at the University of Western Australia and her writing has been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Island, Southerly, Westerly, Australian Book Review, Axon, Cordite Poetry Review, Gusher and elsewhere. In 2014 she founded WA’s first poetry magazine, Writ Poetry Review, with the aim of showcasing upcoming WA writers as well as connecting writers across the Nullabor, and she has been a guest at the 2015 Perth Poetry Festival, the 2016 Perth International Writer’s Festival and the 2018 Queensland Poetry Festival. She is currently editing her first collection of poetry.

Alexis Late Reviews Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Alexis Late

The writer Phillip Hoare, celebrated author of The Whale and self-confessed sea obsessive, once wrote: ‘Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves.’

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Review Short: Aidan Coleman’s Cartoon Snow

Posted on March 26, 2018 by Alexis Late

South Australian poet Aidan Coleman’s previous book of poetry, Asymmetry, was published in 2012. It charts Coleman’s traumatic experience of a stroke, and the resulting loss of symmetry in his body, life and writing. The book strings together revelations made startling through poetic bluntness, from the initial shock of incapacitation to the excruciation of gradual rehabilitation.

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Procedure

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Alexis Late

Your displeasure encircled, like descending mesh, that first occasion we called a conversation. Was I the blanched insect and you the hunter, with your barbed question-net? The gendered metaphor flutters weakly, but does not die No feminist assertion swoops down …

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Alexis Late Reviews Stuart Barnes

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Alexis Late

Stuart Barnes’s early exposure to poetry reads like a literary fantasy. As a child he attended the same Tasmanian church as Gwen Harwood. The two struck up an unlikely friendship, and Harwood encouraged him to write. That formative experience saw him move to Melbourne to study literature where, in 2005, he was handed a notebook and, once again, urged to write. Barnes’ first collection of poetry, Glasshouses, is the culmination of years of carefully honed impressions, reflections and commentary.

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Review Short: Antigone Kefala’s Fragments

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Alexis Late

When casting an eye back at Antigone Kefala’s oeuvre, one finds a poet of the surreal, who has delicately combined reality, folklore, and dream state. She has expressed the trauma of migration and diaspora in hallucinatory ways; she once merged the ache of an old country’s absence with the comfort of myth, and heightened the contrast with dream-like and often disturbing symbolism.

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Alexis Late Reviews Paul Hetherington

Posted on September 5, 2016 by Alexis Late

Artistically, burnt umber is an earthy shade intensified by heat. It is a colour synonymous with this country – familiar to anyone who has trekked through Western Australia, from where Paul Hetherington originally hails. In this collection, it is also a metaphor for memory, which, through the heat of feelings in the present, attains an intensity that overwhelms the original events.

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Review Short: Sandy Jeffs’s Chiaroscuro

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Alexis Late

In her poem ‘The suicides’, Janet Frame writes: ‘know they died because words they had spoken/ returned always homeless to them’. Perhaps more deaths could be prevented if people were able to speak without fear of being shamed or ostracised, knowing that their words might lodge in someone’s mind or heart, and that language, if wrestled with, could offer healing.

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Review Short: Rachael Mead’s The Sixth Creek

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Alexis Late

Rachael Mead is part of a fine group of contemporary Australian poets writing about nature in nuanced and resonant ways. She brings her own slant to the genre with her first collection, The Sixth Creek, while doffing her hat to celebrated writers like Mary Oliver, Thoreau, and Judith Wright.

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