Melody Paloma



Tell Me Like You Mean It 3

In curating this chapbook I’m not sure I feel closer to answering these questions: certainly they are never stagnant … But I do feel closer to poetry’s resistance to answer these questions, which does circle back to some kind of answer to my last question – we return to poetry not because we have an answer, but instead return in a process of regeneration.

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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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To Outlive a Home: Poetics of a Crumbling Domestic 

While these pre-federation tropes of settler colonial Australia’s multifaceted and at times contradictory pastoral modes seem to recognise something of their incompatibility with Aboriginal land, they seek their resolution from burial, rather than reciprocal encounter with Aboriginal presence.

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Review Short: Melody Paloma’s In Some Ways Dingo

The cover of Melody Paloma’s first poetry collection, In Some Ways Dingo, is a work by the artist Emma Finneran called ‘Into Stella.’ It’s formed from acrylic, ink and pastel on cotton drop cloth. Finneran’s work is interested in the material possibilities of drop-cloths: cloths typically instrumentalised into catching ‘the excess paint from Mum’s feature wall’ (in Finneran’s words) and to be eventually ‘rendered forgotten, formless, shapeless, degraded – to be dropped.’

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Tell Me Like You Mean It: New Poems from Young and Emerging Writers

‘Emerging’ is a strange word, and ‘strange’ is probably a cop out. It is often arbitrary, sometimes condescending, frequently empowering and often carries with it an incredible sense of community.

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Melody Paloma Reviews Emily Stewart

Emily Stewart’s Knocks operates somewhere in between these two ideas. Certainly, Stewart is part of a new wave of avant-garde poetry in Australia, and collaborative prowess is surely at the collection’s centre; but it is difficult to attach Stewart to just one particular community.

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Holiday

the gut of a rock catches sea murmur in my throat with swimmer’s ear and something else high tide brings up dark patches where there must be colour or maybe white like these ones dried up on the shore wind …

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Sinkhole Poem

I spend the morning on YouTube watching videos of sinkholes: ‘Terrifying sinkhole compilation 2010-2014’ ‘The sinkhole that is swallowing Louisiana’ ‘Girl swallowed by pavement’ cylindrical chasm in a Guatemalan kitchen, maybe a meter wide. A light dropped in illuminates not …

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