INTRODUCTIONS
Introduction to Lia Dewey Morgan’s Traffic Saga
Lunge-stepping magnificently over some abyss, we pause and wonder, why does ‘half woman’ appear womanlier; earlier, why does ‘half-written’ sound more authorising than ‘written’, or ‘half-Pakistani’ sound more emphatically Pakistani? Is the answer in the curved hand of Morgan’s fiat comma, carving up the line: ‘We are both the tourist, we are both the guide’, or in the ‘cigarette apostrophes’ that mark the various intermezzos that stage a long coming home? Both. Half your luck.
Introduction to David Prater’s Transition Vamps
The unbounded expansion of possibilities, of language, poetics and meaning, gives the poems in Transition Vamps their momentum. It is a peripatetic collection with poems set variously in Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands and Australia. The poet is a foreigner aslant his world. But it also shows up in less predictable ways.
Introduction to McKenzie Wark’s Dispositions 26
Every spaceless space in Dispositions 26 is disposed to be thick with all things, even inequities being equal. In it, Wark is thick with transsexual. She is thick with jobless. She has eyes for the uncanny and an uncanny way of showing the uncanny. And yes, she is McKenzie Wark on dérive and thick with a kind of wisdom about why the enemy is winning and the dérive soon to be no more than an Instagram moment.
Introduction to Andrew Brooks’s Year of the Ox
‘History,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘decays into images, not into stories’. And what is the image? It is ‘that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’. Andrew Brooks’s Year of the Ox is a constellation of images in precisely this Benjaminian sense: it charts the movement of history, not with the logic of linear progress but the dialectic of historical materialism.
Introduction to Sarah-Jane Burton’s Boston Poems
In Boston Poems, Sarah-Jane Burton conjures the city she came to know intimately while researching the lives and work of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. These poems are odes to Boston’s grand public spaces, universities, writers and pioneering hospitals.
Introduction to Debbie Lim’s Bathypelagia
The poems in Debbie Lim’s Bathypelagia are wonders of animacy and transformation. As the title suggests, Lim plumbs depths with these poems, taking readers to the deep ocean, and fathoming the nocturnal hours.
Introduction to Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats
BUY YOUR COPY HERE There could be no more apt place or no-place to read Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats than in an hotel room in the American Midwest, rain outside, sudden sunlight, rain resumes. Here, time feels to be …
Introduction to Alex Creece’s Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth
Alex Creece’s Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a reckless, glorious, grotty revolution. It’s an insubordinate ‘kissyface of cobwebs’ that sticks it to capitalism, heteronormativity and the patriarchy.
Introduction to Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals
Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals opens with a moment of disconnection, as she describes her father’s tendency to retreat into himself when they are together, disappearing into imaginary golf practice.
Introduction to Alicia Sometimes’s Stellar Atmospheres
I feel a sense of delight at the idea of an artist surreptitiously working in a science lab. There is something mischievous, rambunctious, even anarchistic about it. The idea of intervention.
Introduction to Ken Bolton’s A Pirate Life
The author’s playfulness is to the fore in this strange, charming book. It is a game which invites the reader to roll the dice, take a card from the deck, gain points, lose a turn, and, one way or another, advance around a notional game board: a pirate’s world of exotic ports, risky encounters, escapades, wonders and the routine of shipboard life, always in the presence of the moody, changeable sea.
Introduction to Dan Hogan’s Secret Third Thing
What characterises Dan Hogan’s poetry is the way that, each time we come close to fully apprehending the impending collapse of capitalism, we are waylaid by something more urgent and mundane: groceries, emails, calls to Centrelink, traffic jams on the way home from work.
Introduction to A J Carruthers’s AXIS Z Book 3
In a j carruthers’s new collection, verse stanzas, running vertically from top to bottom rather than left to right, challenge the dominant linear mode of thinking and writing in the West.
Introduction to Pooja Mittal Biswas’s Hunger and Predation
In this fifth book of poetry, Pooja Mittal Biswas’s voice achieves musicality. While strong themes lend coherence to the whole, the language cascades and moves forward with an inner force.
Introduction to Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone
BUY YOUR COPY HERE In Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone, we enter a nondescript door down a laneway, casually apply the secret knock, and the door slides open – just enough for us to squeeze through sideways before it shuts …
Introduction to Alison Flett’s Where We Are
Conditional responses to the poems seem not only possible, but necessary. There’s much that slips in and out of light, and Flett’s poems have a zero-sum gaze: where there’s not light, there’s darkness.
Introduction to Kim Cheng Boey’s The Singer and Other Poems
BUY YOUR COPY HERE In this work of a mature artist, Kim Cheng Boey’s characteristic style – literary, allusive, memoirist, with a flâneur’s sensibility – is on full display. The book’s triptych staging – ‘Little India Dreaming’, ‘The Middle Distance’ …
Introduction to Joan Fleming’s Song of Less
A song exists because something has been added to the world. A voice strikes out, human or angel or bird. Hands clap together, skin against skin, or move upon an instrument made from a different animal.
Introduction to Teena McCarthy’s Bush Mary
When Teena McCarthy told me she had constructed this book from poems, lines, phrases and images that she had written on odd-sized pieces of paper and had gathered them until they formed a manuscript, I immediately thought of Emily Dickinson, who also wrote many of her poems on the backs of envelopes and scraps that had been used as shopping lists.
Introduction to Alex Selenitsch’s Look!
BUY YOUR COPY HERE To situate the work contained in Look!, it is worth recalling the rich but neglected Concrete Poetry tradition. Even in the twenty-first century, its challenge to the transparency of the word as a medium of communication …
Introduction to Catherine Vidler’s Wings
BUY YOUR COPY HERE Catherine Vidler’s Wings are in your hands: here’s 66 of them from a series of 100. At the beginning of this book is a black-and-white image of what appears to be an insect with six, or …
Introduction to Ella O’Keefe’s Slowlier
Since 1972, satellites have circled the earth, collecting images of it and sending them back to be catalogued and examined. Conventionally these satellites are called landsats, sometimes EarthHawks.
Introduction to Lucy Van’s The Open
All doors are open in Lucy Van’s poetry. Ingress and egress are multiple, even coincident. We’ve just touched what’s here, or are about to touch it, when apprehension is quickly unsettled, halted or reconfigured.
Introduction to Em König’s Breathing Plural
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’.
