Emmett Stinson



Ali Alizadeh Reviews Chris Andrews

In a recent article published in Sydney Review of Books, Emmett Stinson argues that Australian reviewers’ and readers’ responses to Australian short story collections are regulated by the receptions of these authors in the US. And so, according to Stinson, the so-called cultural cringe lives on. But is this really the case? And should we really be suspicious of internationally recognised Australian writers such as Chris Andrews whose second collection of poems has been published by Baltimore’s Waywiser Press, the publishers of such giants of US poetry as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur and W. D. Snodgrass?

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Emmett Stinson Reviews Kent MacCarter

The three sections of Kent MacCarter's excellent debut collection are marked by recipes of an imaginative kind. In 'Fruit Salad with Papaya-Mint Sauce' he instructs the reader to include 'Ounces of fresh goddamn seedless everything', which serves as an apt description of the collection as a whole. MacCarter's poetry is a sort of mulligan stew that seamlessly blends landscape, as Japan, New Zealand, Australia and various locales in the United States coagulate into a coherent vision.

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Dry Pastoral

Contemporary pastoral? Such a term seems oxymoronic when describing a genre at least as old as Theocritus’s Idylls from the third century BCE. The pastoral itself is inherently backwards-looking, literally evoking the greener pastures of a pre-industrialised past. Even the …

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