CONTRIBUTORS

Alissa Dinallo

Alissa Dinallo is a Sydney-based book designer who has worked in-house at Allen & Unwin and Penguin Random House. When not designing for commercial publishing houses, she also works closely with writers to create artist’s books and typographic works. She is also a co-founder of BookEating Press, a boutique publishing company. She was named Young Designer of the Year at the 2015 Australian Book Design Awards.

Introduction to Jeanine Leane’s Walk Back Over

In Walk Back Over, Wiradjuri woman – read: poet, academic, historian, teacher – Jeanine Leane takes off our wallpaper to reveal the personal and political layers of a nuanced history.

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Introduction to Anne Elvey’s White on White

What is happening in these poems? Or do I mean what happens to us, the readers? But which ‘us’? And what reader? I am not really talking about feeling, although who couldn’t, wouldn’t, feel when ‘School Days’ – a poem that records every detail of white skin and soul, sun-warmed government-issue school milk and British ritual in one colonial Australian home – has another child, likely an Indigenous Australian child, stolen ‘while waiting for a train’.

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Introduction to Tanya Thaweeskulchai’s A Salivating Monstrous Plant

The greatest thing, writes Aristotle in the Poetics, is the command of metaphor, an eye for resemblances. The first overt metaphor in Tanya Thaweeskulchai’s A Salivating Monstrous Plant appears in its second sentence: ‘These noises conglomerate, building like a nest of waking vipers’.

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Introduction to Matthew Hall’s False Fruits

Fruit is the apogee of the pastoral. It’s what the work, the waiting, the ritual and the thanks are for. But the making of fruit is costly and even the ‘natural’ cycle of things will be managed so some factors are privileged over others. In this cycle of post-lyrical poems, Hall questions the form and circumstances of these factors. What are they?

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Introduction to Mez Breeze’s Attn: Solitude

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mez Breeze’s mezangelle language needed explication. People who were unfamiliar with internet and new media culture did not get the references. Those who were already immersed in this culture often considered it a separate realm, a cyberspace, and thus had difficulties with the blending of the digital and the physical, technology and embodiment, code and subjectivity in Mez’s writings.

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Introduction to Derek Motion’s The Only White Landscape

The Only White Landscape is melancholic, in this Wilsonian sense. The poems are scenes of ambivalence and loss, moving between states of recollection and projection, regret and desire, clarity and obscurity. There are preoccupations that link the poems across the collection: bodies (and the clothes they wear, the language of their presence and absence), light (and its close relationship to time), administration (and the twin labours of work and home).

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Introduction to Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses

Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses is a complex exploration of identity, an identity exposed in clear yet layered language, a language that takes us to the core of what he has experienced as a ‘queer Muslim Arab Australian from Western Sydney, from a broke and broken family.’

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