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Ali Alizadeh

Ali Alizadeh

About Ali Alizadeh

Ali Alizadeh's latest books are the collection of poems Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011) and the creative memoir Iran: My Grandfather (Transit Lounge, 2010). He is Cordite's reviews editor and a lecturer in Creative Writing at Monash University.



Act #12

Vintage in verisimilitude. Private Sale – Vacant Position – Business 1 Zone. Scent of sandalwood, inconsequential bells, organic food and runes. Fortitude begs futurism. Health store – Home ware – Souvenirs. Unrequited regret: fetish value fades from my wallet, untold …

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Ali Alizadeh reviews David Brooks

The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a secret history of Australian poetry by David Brooks University of Queensland Press, 2011 ‘Ern Malley? Again?’ asks David Brooks at the outset of this new reading of what is, arguably, …

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Ali Alizadeh reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter

Ghostly Subjects by Maria Takolander Salt Publishing, 2009 Swallow by Claire Potter Five Islands Press, 2010 In his 2007 essay ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’, David McCooey identified the prevailing mode of poetry in contemporary Australia as a negotiation …

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Aa-zaa-dee (아-자-디)

Hangul translation by 김성현 (Kim Sunghyun) How can I define this Real of language in words? Signs betray its unsayable being like a hoax. Has no authenticity cheated by fakeness; condemns all things to fantasy. How can I praise this …

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Grey (회색빛)

Hangul translation by 김성현 (Kim Sunghyun) for Felicity Plunkett i In this World – which is not a world – black and white withhold truths. In a world we’d have multiplicities, the purity of unqualified impurities. In ours we possess …

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Ali Alizadeh reviews John Mateer

The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009 by John Mateer Fremantle Press, 2010 Since the publication of his startling first collection Burning Swans in 1989, John Mateer has established himself as one of the key Australian poets who, for the absence of …

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Vicki Viidikas Rediscovered: Ali Alizadeh Interviews Barry Scott

In May 2010, Melbourne-based publisher Transit Lounge will release a much-anticipated collection of published and unpublished poetry and prose by the iconic Generation of '68 poet and l'enfant terrible, Vicki Viidikas (1948-1998). The book, simply titled Vicki Viidikas: New and Rediscovered, has been edited by Transit Lounge co-founder Barry Scott. Cordite's reviews editor Ali Alizadeh spoke to him about Viidikas, her iconoclastic work, her unconventional life, and her legacy.

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Ali Alizadeh reviews Tatjana Lukic

la, la, la by Tatjana Lukic Five Islands Press, 2009 With the success of novels and short story collections such as The Slap and The Boat, it seems multicultural writing is enjoying something of a revival in Australia. Yet poetry …

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Ali Alizadeh reviews Jen Hadfield

Nigh-No-Place by Jen Hadfield Bloodaxe, 2008 Jen Hadfield's winning the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize for this collection seems truly sensational. Since the UK's most prestigious poetry prize is usually given to older male poets, the 30 year-old woman poet's …

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Ali Alizadeh: Epic Editorial

When ‘Epic' was suggested as a theme for an issue of Cordite, I was expecting it to be either rejected outright or at least modified into something less archaic. When it was actually chosen as the theme for issue 31 with myself as the guest editor, I was faced with a more pressing concern: would we receive enough suitably epical submissions to justify our choice of this theme? Or would the dearth of appropriate contributions confirm that, as literary critic Tom Winnifrith has written, the epic is ‘as antique as a dinosaur', or, as Mikhail Bakhtin would have it, the epic poem is ‘an already completed genre … distanced, finished and closed'?

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Ali Alizadeh Interviews John Kinsella

kinselladivineJohn Kinsella's most recent book Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is an incredibly ambitious and meticulous rewriting of that great epic poem of the Middle Ages, Dante's The Divine Comedy. Our guest poetry editor for Epic, Ali Alizadeh, interviewed Kinsella recently, via email. Their discussion ranged from traditional notions of the epic form, and Kinsella's relationship with it, to ecological manifestoes and collaborative projects, and the concept of 'pushing against form'.

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Joan of Arc

She and the fire

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Ali Alizadeh reviews Bronwyn Lea and Kevin Hart

The Other Way Out by Bronwyn Lea Giramondo Publishing, 2008 Young Rain by Kevin Hart Giramondo Publishing, 2008 One of the most prominent features of these two recent titles – by two of Australia's most successful poets, published by one …

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Ali Alizadeh reviews Philip Mead

Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry by Philip Mead Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008 Once every decade, it seems, a scholar succeeds in writing an all-encompassing account of the practice and development of poetry in modern Australia. The 1980s …

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Hidden Signs of a City

How does one read a city? More specifically, how does a poet decode, and in turn re/present, the language of a man-made space? In Australia (and other 'New World' constructs) much poetry has been devoted to the natural world; but …

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