Melinda Bufton



BABY DOLL PYJAMAS

to even up the more stoic exactitudes – If that is your intent – arcing up the atmos with a little ambient fizz can be the solution. Would you put on a baby doll pyjama? It’s very cute of coarse …

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Introduction to Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone

BUY YOUR COPY HERE In Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone, we enter a nondescript door down a laneway, casually apply the secret knock, and the door slides open – just enough for us to squeeze through sideways before it shuts …

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Poetry Against Neoliberal Capitalism in Ali Alizadeh and Melinda Bufton

Poetry has a long history of disruption, resistance, and revolution, overlapping the concerns of politics with literature and the boundaries of language.

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Melinda Bufton Reviews Ursula Robinson-Shaw’s Noonday

Noonday is an intriguingly built set of poems. As a reader, I am looking to be jolted into a new paradigm. I want the poet to raise the stakes and am generally looking for puzzles I cannot solve.

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‘That is some crafty bite’: Trisha Pender Interviews Melinda Bufton

In her eagerly awaited second collection, Superette (Puncher & Wattman, 2018), Melinda Bufton delivers dramatically on the promise announced in her 2014 debut, Girlery (Inken Publisch, 2014).

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The Possible Dream (Buying Jeans Online)

I don’t know. Does Eileen Myles think this much about her jeans? Probably not. Creating the perfect poetry jeans is not as hard as you think. It requires patience, skill, habitat and armoury. How to be Parisian seems to be …

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Review Short: Nathanael O’Reilly’s Distance

Nathanael O’Reilly’s Distance is threaded with daily objects and locations pressed carefully against each other for maximum coverage within minimum space. O’Reilly’s poems can travel whole countries in a couple of phrases, or emotional landscapes that dart from comfort to the homesickness we glimpse via the sparse beats charged with its evocation.

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Tastemaker Allowables

(15 signs I’ve become middle class) I don’t save anything for good a. I don’t save anything for bad Mind the poorhouse, cantilever side split 60 slow on the know how Berate with the swordfish mouth/kisser Orchestrate Take them down …

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Review Short: Melinda Smith’s Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call

Melinda Smith’s Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call is her fourth collection, her work including substantial anthologisation and a number of prizes. Smith’s self-described aim is to for her poetry to ‘educate, inform and entertain … but mostly entertain’ (being the subtitle of her blog, Melinda Smith’s Mull and Fiddle).

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Review Short: Melinda Bufton’s Girlery

The title of Melinda Bufton’s debut collection, Girlery, asks be read ironically, but is in fact quite apt, bringing to mind a repository of all that is ‘girly,’ in the same way that a reliquary houses relics. Alternatively, it could be a verb: something close to a feminine form of tomfoolery. One imagines a stern injunction to ‘cease this girlery at once!’ With titles such as ‘Dealbreaker,’ ‘Bumper Book for Girls,’ ‘Lollyshop’ and ‘I will call you smitten because it suits your crazy eyes’ among the twenty-three poems collected here, both these associations are appropriate.

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Continental Hourglass

3pm French service at the church of OMG dear secret vision board I have Franco’d up my stays into pearl restraint There are no zips as zips untrusted And you, my friend, with your hitherto plans your golden irises to …

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Review Short: Warwick Anderson’s Hard Cases, Brief Lives

The manner in which poets divide their lives is of enduring, perhaps obsessive, interest to me. More specifically, I’m interested in what they choose to reveal or emphasise, and what they let slide to the background of their visible identity.

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Review Short: Jo Langdon’s Snowline

It can be argued that one way to begin to make your ‘mark’ is to settle on a theme; in marketing, it’s a handle or a simple angle. In creative realms, it can be an oeuvre or a period, with a descriptor. Ideally, it should never be held too close to its object/subject for fear of typecasting, but for an emergent poet, it may well be the thing that reassures readers and helps them with a doorway into your work. For a first chapbook, a theme can also be the way to find publication. Jo Langdon’s Snowline is the 2011 winner of the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, a welcome initiative for emerging poets from the Geelong-based Whitmore Press. It’s a deserving winner, and a pleasure to experience.

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Ellipsis Getting Bigger

Me: Yeah, no, I write too … Person: Really, great! What do you write? Me: Poetry Person: ‘…’ Sometimes that person actually lowers their eyes, bows their head, as though I have somehow reached too far into their minds and …

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Laird, Bufton and an Interlocutor Prelude

Sadly, I begin this post by announcing the departure of Emily Stewart from GUNCOTTON, and I’d like to thank her for the great posts during her time at Cordite. But the world of editing and publishing calls for Stewart with …

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