Angela Gardner



Skiing on Mars

into vapour clouds. it doesn’t get faster with less or flourish. we ski in private raptures of snowfall that dematerialises before us. unresponsive volcanic peaks, laughing at the glide and atmosphere. traverse postcard views saying, they bruise while we’re inside …

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A Field Guide to Triplines

Before crystal and gold dolphin wind down end of the day emotions wash so hard overlooked lavishly by the blunt attention of mirrors. Aeroplanes high time to relax the concept of failure is hideous. Between ignoring and not hearing there …

Posted in 102: GAME | Tagged

Joel Ephraims Reviews Ashbery Mode Edited by Michael Farrell

The presence of John Ashbery shines over contemporary literature, for many as an enigma, indisputably as a catalyst. Part of the post-World War II wave of new American poetry, his name is grouped not just alongside his contemporary poets but among their literary schools and movements: the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, our own ’68ers and J.A.

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Introduction to Caren Florance’s Lost in Case

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

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ROADBLOCK OF WANTS

Witness into (then out of) after-image. Hunts, full moon into (then out of) mouths. Violence. The hearts frenzied climb into searchlight on poison-baited hills. How it costs. Lives made forensic by their reasonable grounds (or not). Stop and search. Safer, …

Posted in 88: TRANSQUEER | Tagged

Winners for the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem 2018

Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2018 Selection panel: Alison Whittaker and Angela Gardner.

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Unkempt if You Will

Unkempt if you will mazy with grass seed and insects. By which you read Summer. A season warm and static. Nothing surely can happen beyond the buzz of the bees in the salvia. Stay here, lie on the lawn the …

Posted in 82: LAND | Tagged

Misunderstanding

A kind of lust forces us back :the sky, the city, all a misunderstanding. See how pale it is a different place each time, familiar yes but rearranged as fear. The ride under our bodies kicks along. You are no …

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

The Future Un-imagine

On the run from the W.A. police, her faking German accent could be someone else: embassies [snapshot] in their circular drives, late night music. Claus plays haus in Canberra, surrendering to the domestic obscene. She home hones in mu-mu when …

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Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series

These ten tiny tomes each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for.

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Review Short: Angela Gardner’s The Told World

Angela Gardner’s The Told World is a collection that made me feel homesick for Brisbane. Gardner is a Brisbane poet, and while some of the lines in this book specifically reference the city, it is not actually a Brisbane book of poetry. Many of the poems are pastoral, but not grounded in a specific landscape, generally the ‘here’ could be anywhere.

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Review Short: Beth Spencer’s Vagabondage

Twenty years ago Beth Spencer’s first collection of poetry, Things in a Glass Box, was published and reviewed to critical acclaim. Since then she has published individual poems and two volumes of multiple genre selected works that have included poems. It could be said that it’s a long time between drinks, though Spencer has been busy with fiction, essays, and memoir (and a PhD) in the meantime. Vagabondage is her first full collection of poems since, and widely anticipated because of that.

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Barely Noticeable

stencil grass and blow— up ponies sadly deflating I stoop to native violets. My mind, a mild and clouded surface women delicately pink winged and clothed their silicon flesh parting under cast iron column arches garlanded overhead with pressed metal …

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Review Short: Philip Hammial’s Detroit

Philip Hammial is the author of over a score of poetry collections. With his new book, Detroit, he returns to the city of his birth taking us, the reader, on his helter-skelter ride. From the first, a poem entitled ‘Mayday’, we are already travelling at break-neck speed, suddenly materialised in an alley with three unlikely characters, plus a bear and a looming summary execution. We enter and leave the poem in the thick of action and must imagine for ourselves the backstory and outcome. In twelve short lines I am already empathising with the un-named first person speaker to imagine him slipping free of the medieval fresco sky-hook descending from the heavens.

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We Are Called

Otherwise volatile substance, walks past in the rain and how nearly we are human, failing and uncontained, within new ways of looking. What to call the genetic distance between us? Sightings of the unwieldy zorse, the liger, the wholphin, sometimes …

Posted in 46: ELECTRONICA | Tagged

Animal Light

Being small and neatly branched your glanced-at limbs manufacture a pressure: Oh shiny thing as you rearrange yourself make me happy. Mid-deal, water-tower in the background a suburban species of sleet to the fore, neither of us makes headway. There …

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Libby Hart Reviews Angela Gardner

Angela Gardner's first collection of poetry, Parts of Speech, won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript in 2006 and was subsequently published a year later by University of Queensland Press. Views of the Hudson: A New York Book of Psalms is her second collection, although Gardner has published several books as a visual artist who also incorporates poetry with printmaking.

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Bev Braune Reviews Angela Gardner

Angela Gardner's Parts of Speech shows what a substantial first book of poetry is all about. Gardner has responded, above all, to an ideal opportunity to show what excites her thoughts and propels her into action as a poet. Her ability to turn that initial energy into a form of words both excites and challenges the reader.

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