What I Saw

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Gayelene Carbis

I didn’t see the helicopter hovering didn’t see it had stopped didn’t see the police at the end of the pier or the small boat in the sea didn’t see one policewoman stood there for a reason a barrier to prevent us from moving forward didn’t see the whole thing proceeding didn’t join up all the dots make connections like good learners do didn’t see didn’t notice totally oblivious to my environment just like I’ve always been but Janine pointed it out to me all of it in the middle of conversation there was what’s that helicopter doing and why is it hovering and why has it stopped and then there was I wonder if the police are connected to that small boat out on the water from before and that’s why the helicopter that’s what the helicopter was looking at and me saying what boat and me not seeing anything and Janine seeing everything but I did see Janine’s face when after an hour of talking about teaching hers mine she said she had some news and I knew straight away it was one of her daughters and she said her daughter had got into Medicine and there was the slightest pause after she said it and her last word was weighted and felt big and bold between us and she said At Melbourne! and I saw the awe the pride and joy in her face it was flushed from the sun and beaming and I saw the way the light caught her hair still as dark as when she was a schoolgirl and she looked at me waiting for my reaction and I can be slow to say or do the right thing but I saw how she was expecting and anticipating and almost willing my reaction but probably I’m wrong and it was simply one friend turning to another with wonderful news and waiting to see the smile on her friend’s face the warmth of sharing wonderful news and the waiting for your friend to say something and I put my arm round her shoulder at the side for we were walking so a little awkwardly I hugged her from the side and kissed her on her hair when I meant her cheek and said that’s wonderful! and she said Imagine! A daughter doing Medicine! and I could see she was bursting with it and yet she wasn’t there was something contained as if it still hadn’t entirely been taken in and I don’t think it was that she was surprised or even shocked at the brilliance of her daughter which she knew so well but maybe more at herself for bringing this brilliance into the world as if she hadn’t thought herself capable of it and I wanted to hug her again a real hug properly hug her hold her in my arms and say well it’s wonderful but it’s no surprise there’s absolutely nothing surprising about anything everything you have brought into this world

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Synonyms for Womblike

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Em König

Ants traverse my legs, only
when I’m a child. Taking off

my underwear to squat in puddles of brown
mud, letting it in. Walking it through the house

hoping for a smack, squeezing
muddy bravelegs into mum’s thick pleather

boots, she doesn’t wear lightly, doesn’t
understand the message behind a flat

heel like I do. Ants traverse my legs, still
I am five squatting over a full body

mirror to see my arsehole for the first time
to see my future, puckered and mint

I can already clean mud from cheap carpet,
can sacrifice an afternoon of bending

can think of ways to get out of trouble
at least until I’m clean. Ants

traverse my legs, I am thirty, bent
over the same looking glass, looking for something other

than cracked, dried mud. Other than
plastic boots, other than my future

womblike, watching assholes making mud-
puddles from desert sands

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

po (i) nt

Posted on August 16, 2019 by berni m janssen
an other flees full stop tidal tugs tyres full stop arm a meant for holding torn full stop tired full stop another slips sleeping awake waters sinking full stop mourning tears are salt in which we swim full stop home in the stars in the pull shoreward miles pebbled our feet swollen with brine full stop this house of our parents dust full stop memory no pleasure full stop wind is up bearing dust tracks pollen cordite full stop tattered being full stop living in small gaps of hope full stop moon shimmers small of ear silver full stop breath dream slow chuckling seaspray coastal full stop our prayers paddle full stop the sentence muttered is without the verb love full stop the phrase of humans all humans these blood beating muscle straining fractured full stop all mothersbrotherssistersfathers the point full stop

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Dear Mother

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Daphne Marlatt

on board P.& O. liner “Chitral” 1933
We had a race meeting the other evening; it was quite exciting. The race card is
enclosed. The dogs are toys on wheels & drawn by a string which is wound up round a
drum by the Jockey who sits with her back towards the course so that she cannot see how
the race is going… My dog won the second race & I won 20/- but had to give the Jockey
10/- for her efforts.

RACE 2. – THE SPINSTERS’ SCURRY
won by Buckle’s Clutching Hand by Reach out of Boarding House

Oct. 20th nearing Colombo
Arthur Buckle, age 27

ex- out of London
recently articled, fished
from a CA firm for
K B & Co., Penang

Surrey dad
badly gassed
in WWI

so Flora-raised, sensibly

“economical” & musical
named for a king
open to ex-

what’s left
(behind

experiri, try, try

…to stand in the bows at night-time

to make it, fit in

watch the sparkling lights
in the sea as it gets churned up
by the ship…

(with a joke not a
joke, experience
just cliché

…they say that on some nights at Penang
it is so pronounced
that the movement of fish is sufficient
to stir it up

those colonial echelons
hard-boiled, & you

bound for the new
a try so

sure / unsure

the whole sea looks
illuminated
seeing & being
in it

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Pictures at an Exhibition

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Lucy Wilks

We gathered in your loft. It was a safe milieu. We took
our medicine and waited. On the wall the countenance
of Iggy Pop floresced – a haggard beauty full of lust
for demi-monde and vagrants. We could not keep our bodies still
so ventured out on Brunswick Street, our wherewithal to catch
the number 86 to town. The NGV allured

with William Blake’s Inferno. Temptation in disguise allured
in bestial fashion, his Dante fleeing in a dance he took
to Virgil for embrace, the latter hovering to catch
alarm evinced by pilgrim, solicitous of countenance
the floating angel. The creatures (neither statuesque nor still)
comprised the wolf of greed, the leopard of more rampant lust

and lion of ambition – a grisly triad that would lust
for souls of innocents. We backtracked to Fed Square, allured
by moving images – Romanian cartoons, each still
a nano-second long. The plot was of a girl who took
apart a book, from which emerged the ragged countenance
and torso of a fugitive, his destiny to catch

the train she boarded, she a mystery rather than a catch
made captive (and Bucharest their Mecca). Far more than merely lust
together brought them, unable their desire to countenance
reprieve of any ending but a loop. Then Saint Paul’s allured
from opposite the stage. The choir was practising, and took
the master’s chiding well. The stations of the cross were still

in evidence, for stained glass windows drew a light so still
we stood transfixed before Golgotha. There had to be a catch
and here it was – no salve without what deposition took
to sepulchre, the spirit yielded. As Christ endured the lust
for crucifixion of his captors, his falling thrice allured
Veronica, her cloth to wipe the abject countenance

of sacred servitude. Agnostic though each countenance
our troupe presented, such compassion was affecting . Still
entranced and moved, we exited as Dymocks then allured
with Violette Leduc, her ‘Ravages’ a must to catch
again inimitably a sensual tang, its naked lust
depicted on the cover, a woman crouched as what we took

to be a golden panther. Her hair, arms, back allured to catch
off guard our pheromones. To countenance a bed we’d still
require from lamp of lust a curtsy, your homing all it took.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Lady Xoc

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Dana Levin

8th Century, Mayan

You’re supposed to say shoke but I like shock.

Lady Shock.

Who drew a spiked rope through her
offering tongue to
burn blood
into the threads of bark paper, coax

a smoke―

so she could froth up
the Vision Snake…

Mouths.
In this particular design

the Snake has two. The lower

disgorges a warrior-god and the upper the ancestral
general-king―

Two mouths: you’d think,
two opposite positions. You’d think she faced

a breaking choice:

Do/Don’t
Kill/

Save―

For wisdom she went to a fanged mouth,
Lady Shock.

So she could answer
a trick question: man or god

of war―

I like
how honest they were, the old

tribes.

Look how she kneels
in tranced adoration, the long spear pointed

at her brow.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

A letter to my never again

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Bernice Chauly

Dear body,

To my never again once lithe, dimple-free body,
to the now double chin and lumpy-dough thighs,
to the now flabby arms that were once toned and athletic,
the never-again flat tummy and the distinct outline of muscle from
hundreds of hours of yoga,
to the never again lustrous hair that used to shine with streaks of furious red and brown,
now thinning and confoundingly grey

To my never again eyes that used to be free from the astigmatism that now renders me half-blind,
to the conspiracy of incoherent globs that appear where once firmness stood,
now inchoate with fright,
to the night and day, day and night flushes that give new meaning to the word sweat
——the sweat which used to act like a sexy sheen on your body and my body
and together we slithered in glorious afterglows of love and its making——
for now sweat sits in puddles under the folds of my neck and on the lines between my bra
and bulging belly,
to the aches that suddenly appear in the hip after a jog,
to the painful soles of feet that ache with a dull knowing
to the creaking knee joints and shoulder joints that seem to need oiling
to waking up some mornings to feel that everything just hangs——
yes, you are bag of hanging things, of things hanging on for a dear life

To the many pills I now have to take,
and the bottles that accompany me on my travels——
DHEA, GABA, 5HTP, melatonin, Vitamin D, estrogen and progesterone creams,
spirulina, milk thistle, calcium, glucosamine——
to the never again ease of sleep
to the never again joy of gratuitous slumber
and to the reality of the word, jowl

Dear body,
I am sorry I used to punish you in ways that were brutal
to the starvation, the flagellation of the self and soul
to the guilt of mastication, and the horror of food
to the persecution of punishing exercise regimes
and the sick satisfaction of pain

To my never-again once liver, perhaps now fatty
due to this sometimes alcoholic predisposition
to my browbeaten lungs from years of nicotine
to my heart, liver and spleen, to whom I have
sometimes deprived kindness

To my uterus, ovaries, cervix and vagina who serviced in the
production of my two daughters, for the gift of a natural birth,
for the children that I will have, never again,
to my breasts who gave milk, who could manufacture milk,
who rendered me like a dairy farm, a cow-like disposition,
with the largess of nipple and fully-functioning mammary glands
to the perpetual sick that ailed me during pregnancy, to the
bile that was created in my belly, every day, every hour for
40 weeks, to that stinging, bitter, yellow bile,
to the insides of toilet bowls, to that, never again

To the aches in the neck, shoulder and elbow
that seem to consistently curse when the writing needs to be done
to the tingling in the fingers,
bites of electrical charges that still course
through the nerves,
to the litres of tired blood, all that thick,
glutinous glorious crimson to never again flow in between thighs,
to the cramping of muscles, that hard grip of pain reminding you that
it is again, that time of the month, of that the moon cycle
which will never again feature,
to the ovary that emits an egg every month,
that swollen pain, that urge that makes wet of cunt, of coition, of acts
never again

Dear body
Thank you for staying with me——
despite my discontent,
my want to conquer those blobs of unquiet goodness,
the scars that have traversed two divorces
the unholy nights on the floor, screaming out the weight of all my grief
the suffering, the soils of love, in spite of all this
you have stayed, still,
to never again harbor certain reckless passings
never again

The body is kind, it remembers,
it forgives, it is wise
it is brave, valiant, virtuous,
never again will I curse you, berate you, subjugate you,
for the body is good,
it is always good.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Chinoiserie

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta

The plush loveseats, the pillows festooned with birds,
Bamboo stalks, the console hewn with dragons’ heads,
Their long tongues unfurled; the teal wallpaper

Where a monkey clambers up a red-budded tree.
Cherry Blossoms? Magnolias? Such chinoiserie
As you wouldn’t find in all of China. Still here it is,

In an educated parlor in the eighteenth century, a kind
Of code for well-travelled-lord-and-lady of the house.
The way my mother tells it, she was twelve years old

In New York City, four to five pugs leashed in each hand,
Each dog paid a quarter to walk in the Upper West Side.
Salems prised between tight fingers, her mother loves

Her ghosts: twice a war widow, once a mother.
The twelve-year-old buys the milk and the bread
And the butter. Slick, slanted eyes, with only a lick

Of green in them. Here she is with the Jones’s bitch,
Against sudden rain off the Hudson.
Her hands red and wretched, burned as much

By leather as love. She remembers her mother
Eyeing the last two slices of bread on the counter:
Let’s pretend we’re rationing during the war, darling.

She remembers not to grimace
When the pug licks her mouth clean.
Because this is my version of the story,

It is getting cold. Because I love my mother,
She is hungry, a child running on a square of bread.
Like a wrecked clock, her mind runs on shy gears:

Sudden man at three-o-clock, sudden man
Progressing toward her over fast blocks; so fast,
Her knuckles give over tight dog leather.

Because he does not know her name,
He is calling after her
In his native tongue.

At the museum, it is decided that the flowers
Are cherry blossoms, the monkey a kind of
Mischievous, sly Eros. “Chinois!”, the Frenchman

Calls after my mother, “Chinois!”.
My mother learns to run fast and harder.
At twelve, there is no larger

Threat to her life than a man. He does not
Mean well, you and I know it, but que c’est un dur
Métier que d’ être belle femme. Wasn’t that Baudelaire?

Isn’t it is no one’s fault but hers,
She is so beautiful—isn’t that the way
He will tell it in his own small kingdom? A girl

Neither Chinese nor of willing age.
After she loses their pug, the Joneses
Scan their conscience. She is conscientious,

Mrs. Jones, when she tells my mother
Thank you, darling, but no, there’s no
Further service required. You can go.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Veto

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Nadia Kim

Be certain and work that grammar
Of real world experience, of obfuscation.

For self-considered bareness
Every vulgar scandal stamp’d a spirit.

Thirdly: the fiction is now—poly-visual,
History, multi-tabbed. “: turned. ” ~with <alt> and markup.

We want punctuation in you! Work! Differently!
But please, with all our civilised technique.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Dry Cry

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Amílcar Sanatan

Old men in open shirts and give-away caps
sit royally on the staircase of the community parlour.
Their teeth grind like their knees in the picong,
empty quarrels about cricket and young boys
on the port smuggling drugs in the fold of brand name clothes.

These elders are not wise;
they do not grow fine with time.
They spread across the shade’s deformity,
talking the talk, turning concrete into slippery parts of
whiskey nostalgia and smoky eyes of lost fires.

Days spent tumbling, stirred cubes of ice,
shriveled fingers dancing in a plastic cup;
full embrace of tropical island slowness
and shit economy with no jobs
or the regard for the dignity of things that age.

As a child, I abandoned the thought
that I would spend my last days on the step of a shop,
leaning in the afternoon air, barely able
to live what’s left of my life in the present tense,
arguing about the golden era of the West Indies, long gone.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

The girl, the one

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Lobna Rouhani

I’m the girl with the curly hair;
The one with four eyes and a moustache;
The girl whose brother promised laser hair removal when engaged;
The one with a two syllable foreign name.

I’m the girl that is told is weird;
The one that is ‘special’;
The one with a mouse on a running wheel inside her head;
The girl who writes fake notes to not play sport.

I’m the girl that hates numbers but devours words;
The one who sees through people;
The one with instinct as sharp as a claw;
The girl who fits with rage at injustice.

I’m the girl that’s told to go back to their own country;
The one who speaks two languages but understands three;
The one that doesn’t drink;
The ‘religious’ one.

I’m the girl that makes peace at home;
The girl with the crying mother and absent father;
The one who has brokered deals with God;
The one that sleeps like a foetus.

I’m the girl with the chastity belt;
The last standing virgin in a sea of blondes;
The one forbidden to go on schoolies;
The one in bed at home every night.

I’m the girl that is ‘easily distracted’;
The one that talks too much in class;
The girl that is segregated;
The one that makes others laugh.

I’m the girl eating the pomegranate;
The one that smells of turmeric and thyme;
The girl that can’t say no when offered seconds;
The one in a lamb induced food coma.

I’m the girl that was forced to swim;
The last one in a race;
The girl that heard the sounds of jeering;
The one with a lack of discipline.

I’m the girl that’s been mistaken for a boy;
The one called an ugly duckling;
The one that wrote a love letter;
The girl that got refused.

I’m the girl that’s looking at you looking at me;
The girl that wants you to stop looking and let me be;
The girl;
The one.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

2.0

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Rebecca Jessen

there’s a sample of the future
on the Sunday morning train
a platform of people
on the Bridge to Brisbane
and the smug stench of wellness
but what use is it to run
only to return

the grapefruit tang
of Saturday night
flayed on sidewalks
and the haven’t you already been here
once today

enjoy your latte among the regulars
where they serve
hipster fries and heaven in a jar
and the failed date from the night before
you’re trying to ignore
the poet who only wants to talk
about boxing
where every fight is the fight of the century
and the punter who says I didn’t know
poetry could be funny
and the man who is every man
shouting in the foyer
I am oppressed I am oppressed
and you wonder if this is just
another performance

what are you going to do
write yourself gently
into 2000 years’ time
where maybe one day someone will find these thoughts
archived in the museum of earthly frights
where you are a sequel
a 2.0 version of your self
and the people who once knew you will look back and say
nothing beats the original
but I like you better this way

*This poem appears in Rebecca’s forthcoming collection Ask Me About The Future with
University of Queensland Press in 2020

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Concept Creep

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Ann Vickery

It’s not a reflection on you, climbing the stairs to happiness (what flights?),
trying to leave at the door the low-tops of ambivalent love.
Whose turn is it to shock absorb the ordinary once more?
Emotional labour slides in restaged or rug-stuck rites.
To hum at the grind, clock-work engine in grandstand traffic.
Assumed face of calm as compassion congests in the blood.
Red-corner smiles of encouragement, Marie-Antoinette comfort
for the over-casualised, infantilised offspring
of the stalled revolution. What goes unnoticed spreads to home,
a tirade of to-do ticks, outward well-wishing and the hug
of small invite returns. Evening vigils to dispel
uncertain terrors. Ghost-shopping for milk, discount
packets of human kindness pantried for the winter,
It’s not just about taking a leaf out of the book, more out of the gutter.
Roof over our heads, heads-up, everyone’s fine.
Maintenance is what holds the body or households together
Sticky-tape rebuilds, take-home projects of heart work.
The hold-all basket of “working families” still guillotine
feminism’s parallel lives and the cause beautiful.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Let’s Not Jump to Inconclusions

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

One November I began to fall deeply in love with a man who just yesterday told me to add tension to my linebreaks, challenge the readers, discomfort the empty spaces on the page. I am trying to listen, but there are so many rules in the world: one must not bend the spines of books, one must not talk about sex on public transport, one must watch out for the end of the moving walkway or else one falls. Sometimes I forget his words and I ask him ‘What did you say the other day that I said can be the title of my next poem?’ and he has an exaggerated look of mortification because he can’t recall. Without geological markers to identify directions we walk in circles. I encircle him and he me, buying each other the same books. Words are our reliable currency; so is time together. I have decided to not bother with linebreaks for three days.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

The Cartoon Version

Posted on August 16, 2019 by George Szirtes

The distinction between my cartoon life
and everyday is never an easy one.
It’s possible in both to come to grief.

Chaos is the natural order: the fun
side of the reign of terror. Violence
is comical. It’s never a real gun

but canes and slippers make a brutal sense.
I’m lost in Bash Street now. An air of menace
hangs by the school gates. My innocence

is cartoon innocence. Out in the yard Dennis
waits for a boy in specs. Back in the house
Dad flexes his muscles while his enemies,

the wild boys, lurk in the garden. Enormous
shadows rise on the wall. A burned out car
smokes on the horizon. A sabre-toothed mouse

grins at a screaming woman. There’s nothing bizarre
about any of this. This is life: get used to it.

There’s always someone somewhere crying Aaargh!



I’m bursting my sides laughing. My football kit
is strewn across the floor. I can hear myself lying
to my parents. I’m Roger the Dodger, fit

to enter the frame, steady, death-defying.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

The Pine-Woods Notebook excerpt

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Craig Dworkin

[….]
The list of the pitches evinces a wish for the roll of persuasive proposals.

The forest catches the faintest snatch of needles, obliquely, falling in a sound. They spiral as
they swoon and then, before resting, hapax, rebound.

Shed needles nestle in a spread of sheltered beds, haphazardly carpeting each conical grade
with a seasonal chronicle.

At some point, this piqued interest in pines will seem also a sting, a mote, a tear, some little
hole — and also a throw of the dice.

The oracle’s leaves speak in complete incoherence — unmeasured, irregular, inarticulate
sibilants; only after the fact do the priests assign meters; the Sybil resists any hint of
explicitness, however delicious, but the priestess insists.

Chance patterns, xylomantic, enchant: the low rustle against sigh; the frantic chatter of the
scatter; a subsequent silence; the rise and fall with which the forest seems, for a spell,
together to descant.

Pines damp what the grasses amplify.

The copse sings with a shimmering musicality, agreeable and sweet.

The chorus, chanting, entrances; the forest reprises; the piner refrains; the aura, plangent,
fades and abates.

A certain very fine air or wind finds its way — by dint makes out a path — and explores
among the ponderosa.

A weight of conscience reckons among the conifers; the walker reflects, wonders, and thinks
the matter over before reaching a conclusion — he makes a decision and then holds
openly forth, continuing the canyon’s copse’s course.

Inaudibly, pitch-tipped needles tattoo their detail to the switch; they pattern the bed of the
bend.

Just beyond the sylvan stream, the sap secretes like melatonin, disrupting the rhythms of the
day.

The pitch of the pines darkens the daytime.

Waves lace the brace of the sea.

Under breeze, the lancing branches blanch.

The music of the spruce mounts from spumid to acute.

A sieve of discriminating needles lue disseminating currents. Their cernicle scries as a searce;
the cribble siles the range of the winds as a riddle filters certain sounds clean out.

Limbs shift in wind to sift, discretely, its noise into tones; their bolting garbles and gathers
the notes into noise once again; a soft musical accompaniment, muted, acuminates.

Cast by chance on the carpet, shards of shadow spill from the coppice and, appalling, dispel
— they scant as they scatter, then pool again, impelled by scintillæ to spall.

The saunter of the pattern trances.

The tamis anthers sparge.

The perse of the spruce fades from bice to argentate to azurine to blue.

Seed pods trip in rings their timber weights.

Winds strip the weeds in spates after simmers.

The breeze then decreases the stress of its shearing with an audible fall: an initial ictus,
beginning with the arsis, descending to the thesis.

The wistful, listening, anticipate.

An isthmus pierces the sweep of the sea.

A scrim of conifers fringes the inlet.

Firs, frim, meld and fret in the liquescent air; the humidity films as the spinet perspires.

One day in the middle of the third month of the terror, the season outpaces the cool of the
pines.
[….]

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

CURB 6

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Divya Victor

Residential Neighborhood
Manteca, California

green veer touches
gray pavement touches
black asphalt touches
saffron turban touches
black hoodie touches
grey jeans touches
white patka touches
cream kurta touches
brown foot touches
gray pavement touches
black asphalt touches
grey jeans touches
saffron turban touches
black asphalt touches
cream kurta touches
black hoodie touches
green veer touches
brown foot touches
black asphalt
but
spit
&
spit
&
spit cannot touch
the yards of voile
split
or strung between shades
of bodies
created equal
under god


On August 6, 2018, Sahib Singh Natt, 71, was taking a stroll on a sidewalk near his home in Manteca, California when he was kicked to the asphalt by two young men who then proceeded to repeatedly kick him & spit on him. One of the assailants was identified as the son of Union City’s Chief of Police.

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

Introduction to Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Keri Glastonbury


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 recurring motif in Brisbane literature, from David Malouf’s 12 Edmonstone Street and the imprimatur left by old Queenslanders on the psyche, through to the grotty hostel of Andrew McGahan’s Praise – an olfactory affinity clear with Frost’s generation too: ‘the corpse of a sofa / its antique smell of bong water’.

In the book’s first section, ‘Schrödinger’s Roommate’ (alive and dead at the same time?), the question of reality is tied to the rose ceremony on The Bachelorette, with a nod to Gertrude Stein. The cheesy on-screen dialogue is juxtaposed with sexual tension off screen: ‘She’s come around to watch – is this a date?’ and thus the show’s hyper-hetero normativity is queered in situ while watching Sophie Monk: ‘The bachies pile coats on Soph, till all we see / is bubbly flute and Uggs. You’re probably warm enough, / so I won’t offer.’

If Andrew McGahan was the masculine antihero of nineties Brisbane grunge, Frost interjects female corporeality into the ever scarce rental market – ‘Furrows to hang a final pendant light / from my cervix – as she invokes the transitory nature of domesticity, as well as a deeper aesthetic sense of time, liminality and decay (or poetics of space) among the mildew and mismatched dishes.

Along with reality TV come the neighbours wanting to Airbnb your spare room for their relatives. Though for Frost, it’s not the McMansioned Queenslanders, but the abandoned houses slated for demolition, the fixer-uppers and the ‘left chunk of a heritage house’ that instil a genealogy of the recent past: ‘a map on the wall from 1995 / shows all the Brisbane I have lived since’. She holds on to glimpses and details, blueprints and ‘Distractions at Rental Inspections’, like the tenant with ‘distended nipples’, and lets sensuality inhabit the gap between real estate rhetoric and reality.

Frost’s poetic is a kind of antipodean neo-Gothic in ‘fungal lace / the Hills Hoist a skeletal rotunda / where bats dry out like lingerie’.
The book’s second section, ‘The Loneliness Act’, continues the witchy tone. The poems read like bloodstained parables and speak obliquely of family grief and loss, including the death of Frost’s father. These poems engage the duality of life and death and the unheimlich of bodies as vessels.

The third section, ‘Stations and a Crossing’, is an oneiric poem about travel in an unnamed city, a male lover who ‘leads you to a room you’ve never seen. An aquarium. You’re so tired of water./ In the tank, women float like weeds.’ Then, reminiscent of Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, “These / my former loves / fingertips’ / on glass”. Relationships and infidelities in the #metoo era are a theme of the next section, ‘Cursive Fever’. The terrain expands across travel in America, ending with a love poem, ‘Bathers’, which reconstitutes agency and desire for women in water, and the illustrious image reportoire that precedes them.

After the Demolition begins by articulating the various insecurities underpinning the issue of housing for the millennial generation and expands this into a quirky, queer, feminist alter-poetic for living and dwelling.

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Phillip Hall Reviews Robert Harris’s The Gang of One: Selected Poems

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Phillip Hall

The Gang of One: Selected Poems by Robert Harris
Grand Parade Poets, 2019


In ‘The Day’, Harris writes a stunning eschatology for Gough Whitlam. For Harris the dismissal was ‘the day of deceit’, ‘the day to lose heart’. As I write this review, I too am demoralized and anxious, despite the beta-blockers. In the crisis of another general election, the causes of a progressive and civil society have again been defeated. And in our election wash-up, the ALP seeks a new leader. Tanya Plibersek, our Kiwi-model hope, has already withdrawn her candidacy for the top job, citing family reasons (this does not appear to be an obstacle for her male colleagues). In this society, is any male (really) a ‘gang of one’? And while I hear the self-referential humor implied in the title, I also find myself butting up against its hyperbole: the allusion to romantic nonsense of one-off, singular (almost always male) creative genius. Will Connie Barber, Barbara Fisher and Grace Perry (amongst so many others) also be recognized/celebrated with the Selected/Collected milestone?

This being said, Harris is an incredible poet of place, of faith, of historical sequence; and many of his poems’ endings shimmer with all the ecstatic vibrancy of Hopkins (or Murray). I do not believe in miracles, I was grown in Baptist/Pentecostal faith traditions, but this book is miraculous – a triumph of its (crowd funded) gang of supporters. And I am so joyful that they have introduced me to this poet.

In writing place, and its settlement, Harris is capable of juxtaposing such lyrical imagism with strongly interrogative purpose. ‘The Dancer’ is a very fine example. Here the poem-sequence is centered less on narrative momentum, and more on an almost surrealist automatism and fizz of unforgettable imagery:

Miriam, in the hallway,
turns

a girl wears a papier mâché mask
and tinsel stars down Brunswick Street

a bird a lumbering wagon of sky

                  - this ghost that can go with aphasiacs
rendering tithes
     without feeling panic
                                         arise, like a kite

Trout leap out of the river, command the night.

But this is also a place ‘before Cook’ where: ‘You have guessed Cook is a cipher / (but of what forest, my dear little trees)’. Historical perspectives might be as beautiful as ‘trout become water’:

but what Cook carried, along with slaves
the seven sheep on eleven ships

tenacious intoxications

conversations that of no volition rise like waves

:   my hands on my lover’s body are forgiven
everything they have been and touched and turned to
that did not feel good or auspicious

This lyrically interrogative intent is continued in ‘Clear Days in Winter’, another beautiful poem of place that is also attuned to ecological concerns:

I often feel walking on the flats
that I’m in a face that is laughing,
especially when the south-westerlies
set the ghost gums shaking. They have come back
year by year, throwing their suckers forward,
moving up saplings, bridging the old torn diggings
with roots, ignoring the hectic counter-attacks
of isolated chainsaws, the spiteful weekend
initiallings done with axes. Lanes and streets
have crumbled before them like redoubts
until they camp equably on mounds.
Then they throw up white arms, they spend
their modest torsos on a place between the earth
and air, loyal to old, unrestricted alphabet,
although the lesser banished them, wrote
lonely on entire skies, brought calves, found gold
and apparitions to worship every moonrise.

There are so many major poems of place in this book, all hinting at mystery and the exquisiteness of ‘creation’ while also adjusted to postcolonial/ecological commitment. There is ‘Concerning Shearers Playing for the Bride’, which is also a poem of ekphrasis in response to Arthur Boyd; and the poems of North Queensland sugarcane country: the sequence ‘Cane Country’; and ‘Canefield Sunday, 1959’. These poems are fueled by a searching necessity for a Treaty with First Australians, for social justice, and by such dramatic and vivid descriptive language. This is a poet, with strong convictions, in love with the world in which he finds himself.

This ecstatic vision is most evident in the way Harris ends poems. In ‘The Call’, a poem evoking the ‘eye of summer’, he concludes:

Christ, called me through from the other side of lightening.
Now I would seek out a comelier praise;
then I felt like one in a room of crimes

as the blind rattles up, and the light crashes in.

While ‘The Snowy Mountains Highway’ finishes:

The vivid blue & heat, at times
so thick it curved and shook,

recalled Bertolucci’s camera.
I have placed myself here in the poem,
at work, check-shirted, to help myself remember
black branches I snapped at dusk, snow
at the wind’s edge, a wombat. Also

to dismantle any aesthetic
ideal, keep, or Magian use
from which I might write.
A pair of shoelaces could be an event
if tools got me by, chains on

retreads and rising early, when
axe handles split, good hickory too,
how far then I drove in His paradigm,
early mornings on ochre roads
to see the light lift silver off slush.

These poem endings are unforgettable in the way they employ concrete imagery and sound to express such delight and wonder towards ‘God’ and the world ‘he’ has created. It is difficult not to be seduced by the simplicity and beauty of this language, but of course, this language also raises difficulties.

I still remember the first time I read Les Murray’s majestic ‘The Last Hellos’. I was a young adult (desperately) trying to maintain my faith, and this poem reduced me to tears. It is a beautiful hymn of love written for Murray’s father who had just died. In this delicate eulogy Murray addresses his father concluding (with a dramatic crash):

Snobs mind us off religion
nowadays, if they can.
Fuck them. I wish you God.

Like Murray, Harris seems to enjoy championing the unfashionable cause of God (though he is obviously more progressive in his politics); and in these convictions both leave me nostalgically longing, but also cold. In writing a poetics of faith Harris and Murray prioritize the role of individual submission to God, neither one examining their faith too closely, or asking difficult questions. In Harris this is especially problematic, because his progressive politics would seem to be so often in conflict with his obedience to God.

In ‘The Cloud Passes Over’ Harris writes a magnificent hymn of praise for rejuvenating rains. This is rain that breaks riverbanks as ‘water flows sideways / from faucets outdoors’:

Some nights 
                             the Lord God of waters
moves down the freshwater,
                             the estuary, rivers
veiled in darkness.
                             In silence He inspects
the snags
                             where the bank drops away,
examining every rotting trunk, 
                             every hole where fish sleep.
He sets aside mullet and trout
                             for Koori people,
for dairymen mourning 
                             under the quota system.

Leaving aside the issue of Harris’s non-inclusive language, in focusing only on God as the source of creation and renewal, this beautiful hymn of praise is not entirely honest. This ‘Lord of all / is at large throughout His creation’ as judgment and death also (flood). ‘He’ was never only about love and life – there were always strings attached.

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Adam Ford Reviews Rae White’s Milk Teeth and Anders Villani’s Aril Wire

Posted on June 27, 2019 by Adam Ford

Milk Teeth by Rae White
University of Queensland Press, 2018

Aril Wire by Anders Villani
Five Islands Press, 2018


Poetry debuts are not necessarily juvenilia. The vagaries of poetry publishing mean that by the time a poet’s first collection is published they often are, at least by some standards, emerging fully formed, able and ready to demonstrate their skill to a willing audience.

By the time a poet has amassed a book’s-worth of work and managed to secure a publisher, it’s a fair assumption that they have found their voice. This isn’t to say that their voice won’t develop and change as they continue to write, but that a debut poet is by no means an inexperienced or untested one.

The debut collections of Brisbane-based Rae White and Melbourne-based Anders Villani are the work of people with honed and confident voices. These are poets with extant careers whose books are a celebration of the culmination of their work to date.

White’s debut collection Milk Teeth was the winner of the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and published in 2018 by the University of Queensland Press. It was also shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 2019, whose judges described it as ‘challeng(ing) pre-existing categories: gender, interior and exterior landscapes, the way we assume language is fixed.’ Milk Teeth is an energetic collection, equal parts experimental and traditional, in which formal and structural innovations lie comfortably alongside poignant and personal observations. White is equally at home disrupting an otherwise familiar scenario with fairy-tale elements as they are with anchoring the reality of unreal scenes with finely crafted detail.

‘Mother’s Milk’, the first poem in the collection, ably demonstrates White’s capacity as a lyric poet while also showcasing their taste for disruption. In this poem the ordinariness and intimacy of a mother showing her daughter’s partner a box of saved baby teeth is expanded upon and heightened into a visceral body-horror exploration of the desire to possess and encompass a lover:

I swallow
feel it scrape & chafe
lodge in my throat.

That night, its crystal
teratoma grows

White’s lyrical facility is also proven by ‘Skyward’, depicting an intimate encounter between partners. It zeroes in on the patterns of light cast onto one person’s bare belly through a canopy of leaves:

I trace 
each teardrop spectre 

with fingers
then tongue

Sitting alongside lyric qualities that demonstrate White’s facility with language and image are more experimental works that challenge both poetic convention and readers’ expectations. White has enlisted a number of other-than-poetic forms into their poetic service, including Twitter posts, programming code and bureaucratic language. These poems use their mimetic forms to highlight the social structures and frameworks that are used to declare, confirm or erase identity.

At times White’s counter-use of such languages and forms to convey political messages occasionally threatens to destabilise those forms to the point of neutralising their menace. The point of these exercises, however, is consistent and clear. One of the most powerful examples of this re-weaponised language is ‘Regarding your Suspension’, a parody of the implicit biases baked into bureaucratic processes. The poem simmers with weary but still-sharp sarcasm: 

‘Dear Rae

Your gender has been flagged
and suspended by our team, due to being
one or more of the following …’

In addition to these poems calling structural biases into question, other poems in Milk Teeth challenge another almost invisible preconception: that of the physical orientation of poems on the page. Many of the poems in Milk Teeth are set at 90 degrees to the usual orientation of a book, requiring the reader to turn the book sideways in order to read them.

While this design decision may simply be a result of White desiring a longer line for these poems, and while it may be connected to the common poetic experience of being published on a screen before ever being published on a page, it’s hard not to think of this particular challenge to convention as being of a piece with the challenges to bias and preconception that White puts forward in other aspects of their work.

White’s challenges to poetic structure and style are in keeping with the way their poems’ subject matter also challenges conservative views of gender. With poems like ‘Microaggressions’ and the award-winning ‘what even r u’, White centres the personal experience of insult and aggression, both passive and active, regularly experienced by non-binary people.

But while gender identity is at the fore of some poems, White also challenges the potential assumption that a non-binary activist poet can or should only write about their activism. This point is successfully made by poems like ‘Plants my exes gave me’ and ‘Enraptured’, which depict experiences like gardening and falling in love that are common to all humans. In doing so White validates and celebrates the continuum of gender with other modes of experience, and hopefully educates those who believe they can only experience non-binary life vicariously.

There’s an appealing messiness, a futz and clutter, a chaos to the world White writes. It’s a world of ‘Biscuit grit in / bed Enoki mushrooms / woven with pubic hair’. There’s tenderness here too, portrayed by a deft hand that pens memorable, shy and gentle love scenes that share space with the boldness and confidence of experimentation and political assertion. Milk Teeth is an eclectic mixtape of a book, a stellar debut exhibiting equal parts ‘fuck that noise’ and a visceral love of life.

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Jennifer Mackenzie Reviews Elif Sezen’s A little book of unspoken history

Posted on June 4, 2019 by Jennifer Mackenzie

A little book of unspoken history by Elif Sezen
Puncher & Wattmann, 2018


Where do footsteps lead, these frustrated blind hunters

In these times many of us from all corners of the globe have more than one place we call home. Concepts of nationality, attachment to place, a sudden annunciation of enlightened belonging or steadfast refusal of it can be dissociative, painful and conversely full of artistic promise. The very notion of home may be welcome or fraught with regret. It may involve mixed emotions or at worst, trauma.

Elif Sezen, a Turkish-Australian multidisciplinary artist currently living in Melbourne, has developed a sophisticated methodology to work across media and to explore these themes. By foregrounding a personal inner life within the rigours of artistic and spiritual practice, she eschews narcissism through a focus on the transformative image. As a poet, translator, and as an artist Sezen has access to a world of imagery which appears to float in an imagined but deliberately structured dimension. Through deft selection, her practice of writing does not overwork its own tropes, which centre on childhood, trauma, displacement, the politics of migration and the metaphysical ambiguities integral to journeys real and imagined. Sezen’s images of trauma carry with them an apparent resonance, tantalisingly suggesting an overcoming, but also simultaneously suggesting the indelible trace of that trauma.

An example of this effect can be seen in the epigram ‘Slap of the morning’:

Slammed doors are still being heard
Who are they?

Coming after two poems focusing on childhood, ‘On the topic of first parents’ and ‘Childhood’, the poem resonates as a deep early memory suggesting violence with the sonorous slap and slammed, and fear through the final line Who are they?. The poem, employing Sezen’s regular trope, the door, appears to echo through space in a similar way to a masterly haiku.

Speaking generally of her artistic practice, Sezen has written: ‘I suggest the continual expansion of a poetic persona as a methodology of surrendering to the infinite’. Her poetry renounces the world’s ability to deliver infinity; instead its imagery emerges in devotional splendour or in political anger at the cruelties inflicted on refugees, especially those in long term detention.

When I first encountered Sezen’s work several years ago, I was attracted by what I saw as the European texture of the work, with its philosophical emphasis and often-romantic interiority. This connection has been astutely observed by Nadia Niaz, in a review in this publication of Sezen’s first English collection Universal Mother. Niaz focuses on the influence of Rilke (and importantly, his use of Sufi imagery), but also stresses Sezen’s access to diverse traditions, including Ottoman and Persian poetics, and to modern protagonists such as Forugh Farrokhzad. Several poems in A little book of unspoken history are dedicated to what can be seen as a constellation of artists, images of whom form something of an interior gallery, a feature many of us share, functioning as icons of our very existence. Sezen’s gallery includes Holderlin, Kahlo, Camille Claudel, and significantly in ‘Our celestial doorway’, a moving tribute to Farrokhzad:

Let’s meet up in your
imaginary Esfahan
in a city where women glow in green, head to toe
when we bend down from
the Khaju bridge, our reflections
on the water turn into non-poisonous ivies,
a city of secret sovereignty
where bombs won’t explode

A significant poem included in A little book of unspoken history is ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’. The open, sequenced structure of the poem allows the key state of the suffering of the body to move effortlessly through themes of spiritual renunciation, the trauma of non-belonging and the vicissitudes of migration doubly effected and politicised. In an artist talk at her recent exhibition The Second Homecoming at Counihan Gallery, Sezen mentioned how moving back and forth between Izmir and Melbourne had left her without a sense of home. In this poem, fatigue enforces a focus back upon the self. In 1. Awareness, Sezen writes:

Now that I am tired
I must open up inwardly, like a lotus blossom
yes, I must open my paper-like lids
towards the benign feature of absence
for I will encounter her, in the very bottom:
that archetypal mystic, resembling my mother
by her glance perforating the silvered smoke
my small self will pass away
because I am tired
because fatigue is a lovely trap made to
save my body from its old cage
I get rid of the worldly clock
losing beguiling sleep

This sequence leads to a surge of empathy, where like an ascetic removed from the fray, the poet releases the possibility of benevolent compassion:

become a voluntary mute 
so I can speak for them

They surrender their souls
wrapped with flesh and blood and breath
back to where they came from

As the poem continues, it develops a floating sense, the pinning of an elusive image, the transformative power of angels, and the devastating liberation of surrendering to pain:

              La Minor         impatience
      Do                                                     black humour
             CRESCENDO                                               the pain
Is so glorious here
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Introduction to Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu

Posted on May 23, 2019 by Anita Heiss

BUY YOUR COPY HERE
*ships 15 June 2019*

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. Nganajungu Yagu is no different, considering, as it does, respect for ancestors, connection to country, the role of the poet and Yamaji identity.

The writing in Nganajungu Yagu is dedicated to Papertalk Green’s mother, and is built around a series of selected correspondence between her and her mother; each provides a deeply personal insight into not only their relationship, but the cultural, political and social landscape of her Yamaji country during the 1970s.

As Papertalk Green writes, these are ‘not just letters’. Rather, they create a tangible story and bond between Yagu and Daughter, and gently remind us of the sacrifices made by most of our matriarchs over time. Each letter and response provide not only a ‘mark of existence’ for the writer but a medium for mother and daughter to connect while at a distance. Her gift is one that makes us pause and reflect on our own behaviours. The love and respect penned here will inspire readers of any age and identity to think about the ways we engage people we love through words. Or, more importantly, the ways we should engage.

The revival of letters here not only reminds me of the nearly lost art of letter-writing, but the impact a letter has on its receiver. ‘I could feel the love hugs springing off the paper’, she writes in ‘Paper Love’.

I challenge any reader to put this book down and not feel compelled to write a letter to someone in their life – past or present.

It is through the bilingual poem ‘Walgajunmanha All Time’ that Papertalk Green clarifies her role as a First Nations writer, and I honour her for keeping our people, our stories and the Yamaji language on the literary radar and accessible to all readers through her poetry. When the academy, the literati and festival directors discuss Australian poetry in the years to come, they should all have Nganajungu Yagu on the top of their lists, and Papertalk Green as a key voice in the poetic landscape.

In the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages, Nganajungu Yagu is a work of cultural significance and educational influence. As I closed this book for the first time, I found myself circling back in my mind to a number of phrases. Those that keep recurring are –

Yagu, I always remembered the beauty of our culture
despite the racism seen in every step I took along years
culture love was and is the anchor for everything done.
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Brigid Magner Reviews Michele Leggott’s Vanishing Points and Elizabeth Smither’s Night Horse

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Brigid Magner

Vanishing Points by Michele Leggott
Auckland University Press, 2017

Night Horse by Elizabeth Smither
Auckland University Press, 2017


Michelle Leggott and Elizabeth Smither are both former Poet Laureates, with distinguished careers behind them. Night Horse won the poetry category of the 50th Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and Vanishing Points has already been received to great acclaim. Even though there are some major stylistic differences between these two books, there are many surprising coincidences.

Published by Auckland University Press, they offer intimate observations about family, bodily deterioration and death. As New Zealand poets, they belong to a relatively small community so it’s not entirely surprising that they both commemorate Jeny Curnow, the wife of poet Allen Curnow, who died in 2013. As a poet in her late seventies, Smither is concerned with the mortality of friends and family yet she takes obvious pleasure in everyday encounters. In ‘Tonia’s cemetery’ she visits her friend’s future resting place and remarks drily: ‘how well you had selected / your place, far better than your houses.’

Leggott’s gradual loss of sight is a central theme in her book, as it was for her fourth collection of poetry, As Far As I Can See (1999). The tone can be mournful, regretting the loss, but she also recognises that other senses are sharpened. There are scents of frangipani — whether real or imagined — karaka berries knobbly underfoot and the sound of Segways passing by. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is perceived in the moment or recalled from another time: ‘So it is still possible to step ashore on the islands of visions and say I remember. It was like this.’ And there’s a sense of wonder at certain moments of partial sight: ‘I saw my hand against a sunlit wall. Just for a moment.’ For Leggott, moving through interior spaces feels like a kind of swimming, with a choreography of its own: ‘Blind Swimming. Let your hands find each doorway, let your / fingers trail the edges of furniture, the tops of balustrades and / the walls of hallways with their punctuating spaces.’ For Leggott, swimming is a way to extend her reach.

The attention paid to non-human creatures is another common theme: Smither populates her book with birds, cats and horses. She writes of a kangaroo with a ‘look of deep retiring modesty / one in authority with the landscape.’ The horse of the title ‘moves in a trance / so compelling, so other-worldly/ it doesn’t see the car lights’ Leggott’s guide dog, Olive, is a constant companion in her prose poems — there’s even a photo of the two of them in the press release. Her canine companion is riffed on, transformed, becoming ‘the dog of tears’ who will bark holes in the last page of the book and lead her through one of them. Leggott also enjoys her presence when Olive is not working, shaking hands repeatedly: ‘I feel her toes flex and the nails close over the hand that is holding hers. I do this again and again, to feel her hand close on mine.’ This is as good as listening to her drinking from her water bowl, which reminds the poet of Gertrude Stein’s little dog and what listening to the rhythm of his drinking taught her about the differences between sentences and paragraphs: ‘That paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not.’ The dog takes part in a Modern Poetry class and her lapping is recorded and amplified for the purpose of close listening.

Smither and Leggott are very much concerned with family and questions of inheritance. Smither describes a drive past ‘my mother’s house’, of which the view is intimate yet distant: ‘It was all those unseen moments we do not see / the best of a friend, the best of a mother / competent and gracious in her solitude.’ She recognises the precious nature of this passing glimpse and its intimation that her mother ‘would soon walk into the last room / of her life and go to sleep in it.’ Smither’s mother re-appears during a stay in hospital: ‘I shall have my way with my daughter / I shall bring her out of this place / of bogus and fruitless whiteness / her wound will heal under my ministrations.’ The poet’s mother, with Marcel wave and gloves, is more real than the details of the room, suggesting that the desire for your mother persists even into later years.

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Jack Kelly Reviews Liam Ferney’s Hot Take

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Jack Kelly

Hot Take by Liam Ferney
Hunter Publishers, 2018

In a review for Cordite, Stu Hatton commented that the reader will need to google the obscure references in Liam Ferney’s poetry in order to keep up. The epigraph of the poet’s fourth collection reminds us of this:

‘The purpose of this book is to convince you
 (the reader) that something is terribly wrong’

This quote is lifted from Milton William Cooper’s book, Behold a Pale Horse. A quick google-search and Wiki-read revealed that Cooper was an American conspiracy theorist whose book ‘unfolds the truth about the assassination of John F Kennedy, the war on drugs, the Secret Government, and UFOs.’ Like a conspiracy theory, Hot Take attempts to expose the world’s hidden logic in all of its confronting glory.

Ferney’s second collection, Boom (Grand Parade Poets, 2013) was an explosion of language and imagery. In Boom, Ferney’s typically diffused subject matter often spilt over multiple pages, creating poems that are equally fantastic and exhausting to read. Ferney’s third collection, Content (Hunter Publishers, 2016) saw a refinement of this expansive style into a more self-assured and recognisable aesthetic. Ferney continues this trend in Hot Take, which offers a significant range of masterfully controlled poetic techniques.

In particular, Ferney dutifully exemplifies theories and practices developed by the New York School, then refined by their antipodean counterparts. He pays homage to O’Hara in the poem ‘Sardines’ by going on his nerve to produce a Ken Bolton-esque poem-in-progress that revels in its almost flippant existence: ‘this is a poem because it has words in it.’ Gig Ryan’s sardonic tone pervades the collection like ‘cigarette smoke and a hangover’s regrets’ (‘After the Rain’). The poem ‘Modern Love’ does more than use Forbes’ classic ‘Speed, a pastoral’ as a scaffold: it brings the Forbesian sense of devotion and craft into the Snapchat age: ‘It’s weeks since you’ve slept / & it’s not fun to stay up all night / tapping these iNotes of poetry / just thinking about is bad for you—’. ‘On the occasion of Buzz Aldrin shooting down a conspiracy theorist on Twitter’ is reminiscent of Benjamin Frater at his most absurd and dynamic. The ease with which Ferney uses sporting metaphors reminds me of Peter Rose’s prowess using cricket and footy imagery. This potentially reductive list of influences shows Ferney to be far more than an imaginative hack: his confidence in using an array of techniques confirms the poet as a diligent and devoted student of OzPo and its traditions.

A distinctive wit characterises each poem in Hot Take as irony dominates this collection. Only Ferney could write ‘[b]y the time you stop paying your HECS debt / you’ll understand no one cares about what you have to say’ or ‘PTSD was straightforward / when you could just belt your wife’ without it seeming crass. If you think Ferney is being genuine, then the joke’s on you: ‘Of course I’m obtuse. / Civilisation is all about / me not telling you what I really think.’ This humour, deftly laced with cynicism and mordancy, attacks our sensibilities ‘like a jihadi’s dull blade through / an aid worker’s pale neck’. This is seemingly the purpose of the collection: to zap the reader out of any complacency toward the world and its realities. Above all though, Hot Take is funny. Lines such as ‘PWN the n00b descending the staircase, / these Chads will know the beta’s far cry’ transcend literary theory and are simply hilarious.

Despite its range of techniques, Hot Take still maintains a unifying aesthetic. Politics, economics, sport, Brisbane, twitter, drugs, millennial slang and naff Australiana are all poured into these formal vessels to produce a distinctly Fernian effect. As a fellow sports-nut, I always enjoy it when Ferney uses sporting imagery to personify abstract ideas. Indeed, sport’s woefully ignorant attempt at being apolitical is exactly the type of flawed logic that Ferney’s poems target. Mixing sport and politics creates confronting and farcical lines like ‘graham richardson in dick togs / staggering through the last k of the city 2 surf’. Ferney’s poems themselves are like modern athletes: juiced-up and muscular.

Ferney’s editorial for Rabbit’s SPORT issue (2018) explores the relationship between sport, poetry, politics, and economics: ‘The jubilation, the actual physical sensation of snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat refuses commodification in the same way that a work of art can be bought or sold, but the way it moves you can’t.’ The deftness of the poem ‘63 no’ which deals with Phillip Hughes’ tragic death embodies this: ‘we struggle / with the ramifications / of a hook shot’. With Ferney, poetry, sport, economics, and politics are so tightly intertwined it’s impossible to separate them. This is typical of Ferney, always hyper-aware of the world’s logic and its structural interconnectedness.

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