Maged Zaher



Review Short: Maged Zaher’s the consequences of my body

This is love poetry for the Tao Lin generation. The consequences of my body offers a discourse on desire as it is mediated by the electronic interfaces that obviate the need for ‘skin to skin contact’ even as they turn out to exacerbate it: email, Skype, Facebook, Netflix (and chill).

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Serial Poems

* There is no distance with God The broken glass of communism Travel again Into a sandstorm I heard death is kind… You need to keep up with its silence Is it okay to stay secular? Surprisingly the clouds And …

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Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series

These ten tiny tomes each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for.

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The Writing: Benjamin Laird

Melbourne-based Benjamin Laird writes computer programs and electronic poetry, which he discusses here in the first of a new, occasional blog series looking at the writing practice of contemporary Australian poets.

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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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(untitled)

in two hundred and fifty thousand years my sludge of waste might lose its poison but nothing’s set in stone except the joy and anguish of being here with one week to practice what we believe but can we sleep …

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