Kate Middleton



From Television

after A. R. Ammons 24 when dystopia arrives, all the world is sick: television relishes the sickness, the teens, who plummet back to an earth they expect to be irradiated—and it is: yes, earth has bloomed new terrors, survivors who …

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Residence: Dwelling with The Shards (an essay)

When S. and I started to talk, the directions were endless, and sympathetic. What passed between us, over coffee and chai, in emails, in text messages, were the names of authors, books, artists.

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The Shards

A friend told me she walked the ks with the tome on her back, weight of exhaustive history collection to understand that other ground she traversed I too cross the same ground (but different) sweeping over the surface —and occasionally …

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Review Short: Kate Middleton’s Passage

In the prefatory poem titled ‘Lyric’, Kate Middleton writes of ‘Voices torn, / pieced, re-sewn’, a phrase that neatly captures the allusive texture and patchwork procedures of her third collection Passage.

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Introduction to Lindsay Tuggle’s Calenture

Lindsay Tuggle’s poetry is uncomfortable to read: the discomforts one feels in reading her work are the very thing that make it memorable. At once immensely personal, ornate, and unapologetically embedded in female experience, it is a style unconcerned with irony or terseness. It is a verse informed by the still-alive alternative histories of the American South and haunted by the Southern Gothic literature that these histories inform.

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Burial

for Neddy Furious bright day on which the calendar notation reminds of jackhammers at dawn, the digging of a hole to be filled at dusk: pool of clear sky unsympathetic to such endeavour, the careful mapping of dogged grief onto …

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Kate Middleton Reviews Bella Li

Bella Li’s Argosy offers readers a book of real adventure: the adventure of form, and a challenge to our sense of what shapes a narrative. This work is fundamentally hybrid: amid short texts and textual sequences that may be termed prose poems, or micro-essays, or short short fictions, Li intersperses works of collage and photography.

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Berg

A fin of ice arising out of sky, frigid sea A single turret above belies the monolith beneath The berg advances at the speed of a pilgrim travelling on foot Calved from huger sheets and carved, desolate its drapery, its …

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Chimera

Cupped by dirt then buried learning in earth blindness to feel history passing the chimera reads the tracery of the city erupting overhead as Arezzo inhales, sighs Hands reach into trenches dug to lay the city’s new walls and grapple …

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Royal baby has first play date

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Libby Hart Reviews Kate Middleton

For her second poetry collection Ephemeral waters, award-winning poet Kate Middleton followed the course of the Colorado River. The Colorado’s 2,330km journey begins in Rocky Mountain National Park.

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Kate Middleton Reviews Kim Cheng Boey

With Clear Brightness Kim Cheng Boey offers a slim volume that, in addition to addressing notions of place, exile and travel, carries with it a deep melancholy of being written in ‘the lone wastes of middle age’. His explorations of worldliness are welcome, and Boey offers portraits of interconnectedness even as he displays and explores alienation. Moving from markets to Chinatowns, from Singapore’s National Theatre to California’s Santa Barbara, this collection often shows the objects that connect the past to the present, keepsakes available to keepers and gleaners alike.

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Review Short: Stephen Oliver’s Intercolonial

Intercolonial, a new book-length poem by Stephen Oliver, focuses its attention on New Zealand, Australia, and the sea that lies between them. With sweeping long lines, Stephen Oliver zooms in on the details of place and geology: the poem is full of cinematic pans over landscape, seascape and human history, fulfilling what is often a purview of the long poem in naming the world and its inhabitants.

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Scenic Overlook

Stop Go On the road into town out of town, sits Horseshoe Horseshoe Bend, King Bend Bend Navajo Sandstone against Overlook de-silted green and Colorado stripped back from red-brown mudflow A mile over more slickrock and sand pools in late …

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Wandering through the Universal Archive

One of the sequences produced by the collaborative entity, A Constructed World, renders the phrases ‘No need to be great’ and ‘Stay in Groups’ in a range of media – silk-stitch, screen print, photography and painting. One of the painted versions of the image shows a naked woman covered in yellow post-it notes overseen by a hulking, shadowy male. These figures represent the artists Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe. The image appears again in the form of a photograph and the installation was staged in various places around the world – as if the only way to get the message across would be to subject it to constant repetition in as many different formats as possible. Indeed, a number of the collective’s performances and installations attest to the impossibility of communication – even as these take the form of images that can’t fail to deliver. Avant Spectacle A Micro Medicine Show, 2011, features skeleton-costumed performers inexpertly singing and playing instruments while six knee-high wooden letters – S, P, E, E, C and H – burn like small condemned buildings at front of stage.

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Alchemical

Your electric moon breast My black-trunked, gold-leaf slip Fall into flux Dissipate like white plumes You’re especially wild With a strange malaise for more Metallic aches, we moor Ourselves to a daisy, sit two abreast: Brush strokes of willed Grass …

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South Rim

Conversation, Where’s the river? overheard Beyond, wedging itself further into red rock Skimming the crust or surfing the horizon Soaking the silt-gifting walls Ducking from gulches, from washes, from side canyons Oh—there’s the river A mirage of silver light, parachuting …

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The Inaugural Sydney City Poet: Lisa Gorton Interviews Kate Middleton

Kate Middleton is the author of Fire Season (Giramondo 2009), was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, and was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year in Poetry. This year, she is the inaugural Sydney City Poet.

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Relics

Gretel to Hansel My torn blouse and calloused fingers— these were relics of our adventure. Eucalypt leaves that clung in my hair; the long-stale brick of gingerbread. The bandages that wrapped my shredded legs after we emerged from the bush. …

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Again

Hansel to Gretel It keeps coming, that night in the woods— a strip of light among the trees,and each time the moon a different color. It haunts me too. It’s as if our small theory of happiness had been irretrievably …

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Seamus Barker Reviews Kate Middleton

Fire Season is Kate Middleton's first book of poetry, after numerous publications in journals and newspapers in Australia, England and the US. Middleton has trained as a librettist, and we see a classical influence permeating this book, with narrative voices discovered for literary figures from Penelope, to Leda, Desdemona, and even the Minotaur's previously undiscovered, equally bullish, sister.

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Dispatches

First: remember it's a foreign country, Your words spun to remind me it's a foreign English fulfilling the promise of years watching white picket fences on TV.

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Equatorial

I Not really equatorial – in fact not at all, but distinctly northern, and seeming twice as close as the city I call home, houses weatherboard and colourful as beach houses carved in the mountain, sunset soon after 4 (being …

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I knew these festivals, these two festivals

An e-mail arrived one morning inviting me to be a guest at the Mildura Writers Festival, the weekend of 1-4 August. I'd been recommended as an emerging writer. We would love to be the first festival you get invited to!! …

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