Jordie Albiston



‘through worlds & worlds & worlds’: Joan Fleming interviews Jordie Albiston

I first met Albiston in a taxicab in Wellington in November of 2014. When she learned that ‘Fleming’s pool’ near her home in Altona is named after my direct ancestors, she said, ‘All right, no more conversation now.

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neodymium

Nd— experiments are conducted at the e+e− storage ring VEPP-2M in the energy range 2E=0.5- 1.4 GeV by physicists at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics Novosibirsk 1982 to 1987 her kids born during that time Norway’s Norsk Data peaks …

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Dave Drayton Reviews Carmine Frascarelli and Mark A Peart

In the nonfiction poetry issue of Axon that she co-edited with Ali Alizadeh, Jessica L Wilkinson highlights the impact that Jordie Albiston’s The Hanging of Jean Lee had on her as an undergraduate in 2001. Albiston’s collection is a poetic biography of Lee, the last woman to be executed in Australia. Wilkinson would later be influenced by Susan Howe – whose practice both informed and was a focus of Wilkinson’s doctoral study – to found Rabbit: a Journal of Non-fiction Poetry in 2011; however, a line can be traced from the early impact of Albiston’s book, to the journal, and on to the fledgling Rabbit Poets Series, which began with Albiston’s XIII Poems in 2013.

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room

this room is brain devices whirr in a chiastic arrangement refrain chorus chorus refrain carolling intimate concert with me o! such melodious gadgetry this room is house it’s solid enough for ephemera holding firm with a granite grasp the walls …

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged

Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry

John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).

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Review Short: Jordie Albiston’s XIII Poems

XIII Poems might be seen as a snapshot of what Albiston’s main concerns have been since Botany Bay Document (1996) appeared culminating with, I think, Vertigo (2007). Her publications since the mid-2000s reflect on similar concerns but with more biographical tones. Albiston’s main interests have been history, limitations or framed lives, their voices and interpretations of them, often using easily located words to tie groups of poems (‘heart,’ ‘black,’ and ‘white’ feature in XIII Poems).

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David Gilbey Reviews Jordie Albiston and Liam Ferney

Jordie Albiston’s the Book of Ethel and Liam Ferney’s Boom illustrate two dramatic obverses in contemporary Australian poetry. Both are cleverly crafted; both have levels of subtlety and manifest strength; both are linguistically sinuous and inventive, taking liberties with conventional style and syntax; both use local vernaculars in contexts of global cultural pressures; both focus, often minutely, on particular individuals caught at moments of historical change and significance and, therefore, articulate and explore ‘political’ consequences and issues; both play – gloriously, ironically, iconoclastically – with language registers as a way of exposing implied ‘bigger pictures’. And yet these two collections are worlds apart in focus, style, nuance, framing and poetic affect.

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Phi

Jericho walls always fall hard on the ear too many signs luxate too brightly the eye once we believed in a thing call it silence a thing like a thing like a song we believed in a visual dream call …

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Suspensions of the Real

Studying the Sylvia Plath archival papers at Smith College in 1993, poet, editor and critic Felicity Plunkett intuited that a number of pages were missing from one poem draft. Plath assiduously page-marked drafts of the poems that were to become the Ariel poems. Plunkett was unable to uncover these pages in any of the archives made available to her, which were still in the process of being organised. One night, in dream, she ‘receives’ a phone call, made from a black, period-piece telephone, words delivered in Plath’s idiosyncratic trans-Atlantic diction – ‘look in the yellow folder’.

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A White Woman’s Guide to Indigenous Art

When you first arrive, the doors are shut, Big white doors, space off limits, nothing To see here, wrong day, wrong time, Interior closed to outsiders, go home. She is somewhere in there, you are not. When you return, a …

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Greg Westenberg Reviews Jordie Albiston

To read Jordie Albiston’s The sonnet according to ‘m’ is to play the part of the village agnostic watching the reliquary in the local saint’s procession. “In this form,” William Carlos Williams said of the sonnet, “perfection is basic.” As with the skilfully worked metal of the reliquary, the sonnet is perhaps a little white these days from infrequent dusting, yet it stands on a high shelf among the household gods of the Western Canon.

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Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Jordie Albiston

One might think a collection devoted entirely to a break-up could become tedious or lamentably repetitive, but Jordie Albiston ensures that each poem in Vertigo: a cantata has a unique vibrancy and separate tone. This is a book one can read again and again, since so much of it resonates with a universal experience of love and loss. But a personal identification with the book's themes would not be the only thing compelling this reviewer's return to this something-like-a-verse-novel collection; I also find its lyricism stirring.

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Matt Hetherington Reviews Jordie Albiston

Given the small amount of time available between the book’s release and the deadline for this piece, there are still some poems I find impossible to respond remotely in an objective fashion. Two in particular [‘How I Spent Night in Twenty Lines or Less # 2’ and ‘Twelve (Transverse) Octaves, F#’] are difficult for me to inhabit for very long. Which is, of course, a great compliment.

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Soul vs Body

Jordie Albiston's fourth collection, The Fall, was released in 2003 – read Matt Hetherington's review of this book here.

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