Keri Glastonbury



Keri Glastonbury Reviews Grace Heyer, Panda Wong, Rory Green and Siân Vate

Slow Loris Series 1 slouched onto the scene back in 2018, as a Puncher & Wattmann chapbook series edited by then Newcastle-based (now Bega-based) poet Chris Brown. Akin somewhat to the EP, the slew of titles now accruing on the website remind me of browsing through record bins as an adolescent: Daniel Swain’s You Deserve Every Happiness, But I Deserve More (Series 2, 2019) or Duncan Hose’s Testicles Gone Walkabout (Series 3, 2020) give an indication of the pith and pitch of this welterweight form.

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Me and my Rhythm Box

–Pipalyatjara (APY Lands) red dust creates a henna effect in your silver hair as we drive into the centre of town on sunset past the ice cream truck mr whippied over a ghost sign for fire the mirage is like …

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Never Be Alone Again: Hip-Hop Sampling as a Technique in Contemporary Australian Poetry

One of those most important battles of hip-hop’s first two decades wasn’t waged between two MCs at a cypher. And it wasn’t a couple of b-boy crews popping and locking at a block party. Instead, it pitted a hip-hop clown against a puffy-sleeved Irish balladeer.

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Introduction to Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition

BUY YOUR COPY HERE Philosophical questions of reality and duality underpin many of the poems in Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition, leading to a sense of rebuilding and remembrance in the aftermath of abodes. The potency of houses is a …

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Melody Paloma Reviews Keri Glastonbury

What is it about the sonnet? How is it that the infinite possibilities of those 14 lines can remain as persuasive and perplexing in 2018, in Newcastle, as they did in fourteenth century Italy?

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CONFESSION Editorial

Charles Whalley’s essay on post-internet poetics ‘This has been a blue / green message exiting the social world’ takes its title from a Sam Riviere poem, which makes me imagine ‘blue / green’ text messages bubbling like algae blooms on a mobile phone.

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Submission to Cordite 57: CONFESSION

Poetry for Cordite 57: CONFESSION is guest-edited by Keri Glastonbury. I must confess I’ve made a mess of what should be a small success Courtney Barnett, ‘Pedestrian at Best’ Whether you’re more influenced by Delmore Schwartz’s ‘The Heavy Bear Who …

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Review Short: Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Diurnal

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Diurnal is a slim chapbook of 24 numbered poems of seven two-line stanzas, which by my reckoning makes it a sonnet sequence. The cover of the edition I received is reminiscent of silver gelatin, with stark tree branches visible in the glooming (the chapbook comes in a series of three colours). The image is evocative of the tone of the poetry and while the title evokes the daily, it suggests that there are long, dark days of the soul, as well as nights. What of the noir of the day?

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Chronotope Highway

The forgotten allure of conversations inside cars, like fast and furious, but cooler. Your brown dog in his many pantone shades is left behind in Cooranbong where we kill the get directions voice, her indefatigable English accent permanently miffed at …

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Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace

Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.

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In Newcastle, In Tokyo …

Skye is a 2 bit whore: “The Nomads Motorcycling Club are inviting local residents” jumping castles on Chinchen Street filled with April fools. Walking down the drain as a form of object oriented ontology (ooo) eventually finding every piece of …

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Review Short: Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land

As I write this review, sunlight filtered through a pall of smoke casts a dull orange glow over my kitchen bench. The Blue Mountains are burning. Sydney’s haze resembles downtown Beijing’s and it’s only October. Such an apocalyptic scene – part of the ‘Australian experience’ I am assured by our Prime Minister – provides context for the world into which Outcrop and its ‘radical poetry of land’ emerges. This is not to suggest that the anthology’s outlook is primarily environmental, but that alternative ways of examining land are sorely needed.

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Keri Glastonbury Reviews Australian Love Poems 2013

In his 1951 essay ‘Against Poets’, Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz describes the poet ‘as a being who can no longer express himself as much as someone who must express – a Poem’. With such sentiment in mind I approached Australian Love Poems 2013 with some apprehension. Despite all the lofty rhetoric surrounding love poetry – and, understandably, there is plenty of it in the eloquent, generous introduction to this anthology by editor Mark Tredinnick – would it ultimately prove, as Gombrowicz might suggest, to be a ‘boring orgy’?

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Keri Glastonbury on Derek Motion

The title of Derek Motion’s recent poetry collection lollyology alludes to a theory of lollypops. If, as Urban Dictionary suggests, a ‘lollyologist’ (lollypop maker) is also street shorthand for the ‘most pointless job position in the world’, then Motion is willing to elevate this ‘pointlessness’ to a field of study, or perhaps an art. I’m not sure if this is intended as a comment on poetry and poetics, though with its lurid purple cover image of a toy truck the tone and aesthetics of lollyology appear punkish and juvenile, in a Bow Wow Wow ‘I want candy’ kind of way (although Motion’s ‘indie’ points of reference are more likely The Lemonheads, Dinosaur Junior and ‘another canberra bar / josh pyke’).

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Fat

If I could, I’d become a liposuction vampire: a bat that would suck out fat rather than blood. I’d be a popular creature of mythology, pursued by many women. After all, the early 21st century is interminable purgatory for the …

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Tim Wright Reviews Keri Glastonbury

Keri Glastonbury’s first full-length collection, grit salute, gathers together work written since her 1999 Five Islands Press chapbook Hygienic Lily. Glastonbury’s published poems date from the late 1980s, and as such – and, it has to be said, because of publisher delays – this volume has been much anticipated by admirers of her poetry. Glastonbury is known in the Sydney and Newcastle scenes as a teacher of poetry and cultural studies, and as a champion and enthusiast of new critical and creative writing, particularly by younger writers; one example of the latter being her revival, with others, of the important 1980s Sydney imprint, Local Consumption Publications.

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Rent Boy

We started to watch Alien on video but it was dubbed not subtitled. We had already talked each other blue in the face. So spurred on by a dose of male pheromones and inspired by a Sony installation and a …

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Pulp

In love I’ll usually effect a threshold. Usually a stream. And there we splash and banter. The threshold is my flattened-out organs without a summit. Or sometimes I dig holes and think that I’m clever. It’s a method of frustration …

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