- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with 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