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- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
Adam Aitken
Jennifer Mackenzie Reviews Grace Yee and Adam Aitken
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” During the excitement of multiple events and literary get-togethers at the Ubud Writers Festival this year, the Indian poet, Sudeep Sen, brought to my attention Wittgenstein’s well-known quotation from the Tractatus of 1922. It seemed particularly apt as multiple languages, overheard in the daily comings and goings around festival sites, lit up many a conversation.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Grace Yee, Jennifer Mackenzie
Vespers
In the vigilant years, when the sunset rises to nothing you see entirely what the screen sees, completely at one with that and don’t have to suffer. To persist through autumn. Keep pruning the herbs, like a Benedictine monk: resentment …
Posted in 101: NO THEME 10
Tagged Adam Aitken
David Gilbey Reviews Adam Aitken and Elizabeth Allen
In a judicious review of two ‘lucid and intelligent books’ on the job of the literary critic* and of a new edition of Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, Edward Mendelsohn argued against the essential nostalgia of criticism in favour of a version of Kant’s ‘universal subjective’: finding ways to cross ‘the disputed border between popular and elite culture … without pretending it doesn’t exist’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, David Gilbey, Elizabeth Allen
Pilgrim Brother
My Other reminds me of a Viking prince piloting a hot air balloon in Central Desert cumulus. Currency-lad come good, no need to spend his rent on a nicked Beemer. His old mates take the prize for mayhem. I see …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged Adam Aitken
untitled
After harvest there were autumn days of airy nothings. Plein-air. I hoped that one day, like this we could build ourselves a new estate to take the place of the old one indexed to its horizon of dismantled chateaux. We …
Posted in 82: LAND
Tagged Adam Aitken
Winter, Fifth Avenue, New York (1893)
How I might learn to know by looking at something a long time, the way head, heart and hands infuse darkroom chemistry, Stieglitz trying too hard to always make the light exactly what we see: a planned attempt at definition …
Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC
Tagged Adam Aitken
Alyosha Wiengpong, Untitled and Translated
Untitled Bound and syntaxed, threads of words in books transfix me Create their own being, slither like snakes Leave a crust of slough upon the flat dry tussock grass The skin thrilled, covered with tired letters Only the backbone precarious, …
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Alyosha Wiengpong, Sumana Aitken
Review Short: Timothy Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences
Recently I watched a program on the resurgence of Pauline Hanson. In one scene Hanson stands in her old fish and chip shop in Ipswich, Queensland, a business she sold to a Vietnamese Australian lady named Mrs Thanh. Hanson boasts of her hard work, and takes over the frying. Hanson proceeds to advise Mrs Thanh on how to make potato scallops fluffier.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Timothy Yu
Review Short: Adam Aitken’s One Hundred Letters Home
It has taken me more than a hundred days to read Adam Aitken’s One Hundred Letters Home. The book arrived in my letterbox in Sydney at the beginning of May. Autumn turned into winter, and the fragments of Aitken’s palimpsest-memoir started to unfold themselves to me.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Eileen Chong
Adam Aitken Interviews Martin Harrison
I’ve known Martin Harrison since 1985, when I first met him in Newtown, New South Wales. I had been an undergraduate and aspiring poet at the University of Sydney, and we were neighbours.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Ezra Pound, Martin Harrison, robert adamson
Adam Aitken Reviews Nicola Madzirov and Jan-Willem Anker
I am holidaying in a small farming hamlet in the south of France. I have brought two books of poetry written by contemporary Europeans and republished in handsome Vagabond Press European Series editions. A Sydneysider most of my life, I’ve been coming to France regularly since the mid-1990s, accompanied by my wife who’s English and whose parents live in the region. I’m enjoying my dose of the old world, but thinking, what is home? And what is home to me and to these farmers? More precisely, what is it about Europe today that we value?
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Jan-Willem Anker, Nicola Madzirov
Timothy Yu Reviews Contemporary Asian Australian Poets
A decade ago, Cordite Poetry Review asked me to write a review of its tenth issue, ‘Location: Asia-Australia.’ In my review, I wrote that while the issue did a splendid job of showing the intersection between two separate places called ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ it was less clear whether the ‘Asian-Australian’ could also be a thing unto itself, a kind of writing that might be visible within domestic as well as international spaces.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, Michelle Cahill, Timothy Yu
The Sherriff Buys Hawai’i
O’Hara in pyjamas Stevens in Fedora Mel Gibson drunk. One smart feriner shoots up the Common Room. But only a dream of all the heroes I wanna be. Officially I am Alien Resident. I rustles up some buddies tough white …
Posted in 57: MASQUE
Tagged Adam Aitken
Asian Australian Diasporic Poets: A Commentary
This essay provides a survey of the poetry of some Asian Australian poets, and does not attempt to be definitive. Diasporic poetics raise more questions than they answer and are just as much about dis-placement as about place, just as much about a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ as about certainties of style/nation/identity.
The Coffee Bean Prophecies
1 In Laos, when people see Good Luck, they’ll touch you on the arm and ask your name and where you are going. They’ll want to be there when the snake crosses the road, when the monk anoints their wrists …
Posted in 50: JACKPOT!
Tagged Adam Aitken
Adam Aitken Reviews John Mateer
Southern Barbarians is a book that explores both the colonised and the colonizing impulse through the inflections of the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas by Camões, the explorer/soldier/poet-traveller and heroic poet of the Portuguese. The book ranges from Lisbon to Macao, taking in Indonesia, Malaysia, Warrnambool, and Japan on the way. This is a world where African businessmen in Macao see ‘African wildlife’ in a travel agent’s window, in an image of savannah they are no closer to than the Macanese.”
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, John Mateer
Liam Ferney Reviews Pam Brown and Adam Aitken
Poetry doesn't pay the bills but it does have benefits; claiming your internet and a trip to Melbourne back on tax, for instance. Or the overseas fellowships distributing poets across the globe like water from a sprinkler, as is the case with the authors of the titles under review.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, liam ferney, Pam Brown
Adam Aitken: Lines from The Lover
It was never a question of beauty but something else. Mind for example. For a long time you had no dress of your own, except those your mother had her servant make. D– could sew with hair-fine needles, pleats and …
Posted in 32: MULLOWAY
Tagged Adam Aitken
Adam Aitken: Notes on the River
Prologue a river's there for cutting grass for police to drop their pants have their fill al fresco for girls to sober up on a life whittled away by extortion icons of shame drifting in the garden shadows …
Posted in 32: MULLOWAY
Tagged Adam Aitken
Innocence
Remember the sundowner, those bullet point recipes for WW2 American cocktails? Those poolside romps with vacationing English teachers, sunburnished Nova Scotian girls? Remember the Dubai go-between? Before you went for the sainthood? Remember the days of caramel brandy and Bali …
Posted in 28: INNOCENCE
Tagged Adam Aitken
Adam Aitken Reviews Philip Hammial
Who is Philip Hammial? If you read Hammial's 16th book of poems, it will strike you as surprisingly biographical without sounding too auto-biographical – after all it's Philip Hammial poetry. Who is Philip Hammial, the poet? What's his world?
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Philip Hammial
Lament: The Chicken Rice Hawker, Penang
Adam Aitken is the author of Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles (Brandl and
Schlesinger). He is now completing an unreliable (fictionalised) memoir
about his parents.
Posted in 18: ROOTS
Tagged Adam Aitken
Hybrid Heaven
Two-way MMDS: Today and Tomorrow (HEV) Program. Search. What is an HEV HEV Components Frequently 2000 HYBRID Comments? swap kits, customization and modification of the model. It's not just a concept. Graphical tutorial explains the workings with low prices and …
Posted in 16: SEARCH
Tagged Adam Aitken
Three Sonnets
‘The East is a career.' – Benjamin Disraeli 1. The Maharaja from Maroubra My jumbo landed its one wheel of faith. The runway of the heart was dark. Our import was a virus that flooded their cells then decimated the …
Posted in 06: NEW POETRY
Tagged Adam Aitken
