Lisa Samuels



Owen Bullock Reviews A Transpacific Poetics

Lisa Samuels’s introductory essay, ‘What Do We Mean When We Say Transpacific’, begins with a quotation from Pam Brown that is particularly well-chosen for this volume. Brown claims that the ‘authentic’ pertains to someone who isn’t manipulated or being alienated from their context. There’s a good deal in this book about alienation relating to identity and culture; many of the authors have had to fight to preserve authenticity.

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Sally Evans Reviews Lisa Samuels x 2

Water, Lisa Samuels asserts in her 2010 manifesto for ‘archipelago poetics’, is ‘the unsettling undefined’: the tactile yet formless flow that both separates and joins groups of islands just as language separates and joins groups of selves. With her finely honed, comprehensive poetic and critical capacities, Samuels is a transcultural LangPo marvel – hiding in plain sight here in the wide wetness of the Pacific Ocean since relocating from the US to New Zealand in 2006.

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The last to know

It seems contusion ceremonies grace the serious approach, yes I think so do that, they deep and deeper consider and there is – lull back – plunk and o touch scratch bird come to announce like turning a corner around …

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Worry rung (Wurrung)

The hour strikes and you strike back a feathery blankness pre-Socratic mean sets up a fervor specked with broken elements, waking to the heat and driving hither air and you particulate the more like license of a congregation giving itself …

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Trans-Tasman: Book Reviews and Best New Zealand Poetry 2013

It’s 2014. Time to expand / add to the Trans-Tasman conversation on poetics between Australia and New Zealand. The Best New Zealand Poems 2013 has now been published. Online only. Check it out. Congratulation to Murray Edmond, Anne Kennedy and …

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Lisa Samuels Reviews The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

The dust jacket for this anthology was justifiably awarded for the subtle arrest of its front visual. The front features a photo-semblance of four prior anthology dust jackets torn back to reveal the newest cover, simple beige paper with blue and beige print used for the title and editor names. This cover also reveals something about the enterprise inside: this newest entry is a beige discretion suffused by its relations to anthology making of the past. The 1164 pages within bear the desire of this anthology to be another in a sequence of Last Words.

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Enter Cordite Scholarly

Cordite Scholarly is a new section of Cordite Poetry Review devoted to peer-reviewed research on Australian and international poetry and poetics. Essays published in Cordite Scholarly are reviewed by at least two members of Cordite’s Academic Advisory Board (or see …

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