CONTRIBUTORS

Zoë Sadokierski

Zoë Sadokierski is a Sydney-based designer and writer. She has designed more than 250 books for various Australian publishers, and is Vice President of the Australian Book Designers Association. Zoë lectures in the School of Design at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she runs the Page Screen research studio, experimenting with publication models for limited edition print and digital books. She also writes a column on book culture and reading in a digital age for The Conversation.

http://www.zoesadokierski.com/

Introduction to Em König’s Breathing Plural

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Zoë Sadokierski

Will we miss nature, asks Em König in Breathing Plural? In ‘dreams of stale breath’, maybe. Or ‘in another life, on another planet … maybe’ (echoing The Only Ones’ only hit). Glenn Albrecht says in Earth Emotions, ‘It [nature] effectively no longer exists’.

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Introduction to Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Zoë Sadokierski

I’ve noticed that Prithvi Varatharajan thinks carefully about offering a true gesture, word or position in every social exchange. I sense that, for him, all communication is an art defined by authenticity rather than decadence. His reflective nature is continuous with the character of the poetics in Entries.

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Introduction to John Mukky Burke’s Late Murrumbidgee Poems

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Zoë Sadokierski

John Mukky Burke – one of my favourite philosophers – is the most underrated poet in Australia. His usual lacerating intelligence and empathy are here in this sensational collection, but ‘exuberance’ is the word that keeps occurring to me as I read. Burke is a poet who, in maturity, has shed many masks and is the better for it.

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Introduction to Astrid Lorange’s Labour and Other Poems

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Zoë Sadokierski

This book is titled Labour and Other Poems. Just as Astrid Lorange speaks of building a poetics – intensive and intentional – as a way of perceiving the world of relations in their shadow, every poem here requests an attentiveness to the multiple relations of our lives, to the entwining of senses and references.

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Introduction to Caren Florance’s Lost in Case

Posted on August 28, 2019 by Zoë Sadokierski

BUY YOUR COPY HERE Caren Florance works in the Venn overlaps of text art, visual poetry and creative publishing. Her work is hard to pin down, principally because the artist herself is not interested in a static outcome. Much of …

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Introduction to Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Zoë Sadokierski

BUY YOUR COPY HERE Philosophical questions of reality and duality underpin many of the poems in Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition, leading to a sense of rebuilding and remembrance in the aftermath of abodes. The potency of houses is a …

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Introduction to Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu

Posted on May 23, 2019 by Zoë Sadokierski

Since Charmaine Papertalk Green’s poetry was first published in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets in 1986, her voice on the page has been consistent: eloquently powerful, respectfully challenging and true to her role in life as a Yamaji Nyarlu.

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Introduction to Louise Crisp’s Yuiquimbiang

Posted on December 29, 2018 by Zoë Sadokierski

Read. This is poetry. Both a praise and a lament for Country. Read. There is little like it. Australia struggles with an embrace of the past, but Louise Crisp does not flinch from the intimacy of fact.

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Introduction to Marjon Mossammaparast’s That Sight

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Zoë Sadokierski

Photo by Gen Ackland. BUY YOUR COPY HERE Marjon Mossammaparast’s That Sight offers us a wide-ranging series of viewpoints, taking the reader through various locations and histories. It zooms out to cosmological heights, and even beyond to God (or the …

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Introduction to Elena Gomez’s Body of Work

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Zoë Sadokierski

There’s a difference between occupying a seemingly unceasing parade of subject positions through a kind of colonising, thieving, dissipatory borderlessness … and inhabiting them as a form of aesthetic and political revolt.

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Introduction to Helen Lambert’s Echoland

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Zoë Sadokierski

Helen Lambert’s work is as new to me as it will be to others – she has been operating away from Australian poetry for some time, with long periods in Ireland and, lately, Russia. One approaches a new poet warily. Yet the inventive and capable intelligence behind the poems here is immediately apparent. It is wonderful to be able to drop one’s guard, to forget it – and to enter a wonderful world.

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Introduction to Siobhan Hodge’s Justice for Romeo

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Zoë Sadokierski

Justice for Romeo, as a title, will seem both accurate and misleading for most readers; this is a book decidedly concerned with justice, and Siobhan Hodge’s sense of ethical responsibility pervades the poems. Hodge’s book includes as epigraph the exchange between Romeo and a servant in Act I, Scene ii of the most famous love story of all time; the servant asks, ‘I pray, can you read any thing you see?’, to which Romeo replies, ‘Ay, if I know the letters and the language.’

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