michael brennan



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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Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry

John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).

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Review Short: Michael Brennan’s Autoethnographic

Michael Brennan’s Autoethnographic requires a curious reader, one to read its sketch-like poems carefully. The title, a reproduced image by Erico Tonotsuka and epigraphs by Edward Sapir and John Grey (‘We see the world through eyes of ancient mud’) suggest we should be reading the language of the poems reflexively, with an eye towards their ontological implications. But the poems don’t fit into this frame, and employ plain speech, dark comedy and lyrical melange un-reflexively.

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Toby Davidson Reviews Michael Brennan and Barry Hill

Unanimous Night and Four Lines East are very different collections physically, the latter being a limited edition chapbook of thirty-five pages, but they both revolve around a central theme of the Australian poet out in the world, away from home, discovering new dwellings for body and mind in the process.

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Michael Brennan: A Short History of Vagabond Press and Poetry International Australia

Chance and community might best describe how I edit and publish poetry. Chance in the unlikely alignment of latching onto good poems available for publication and that suit the nature of whatever I'm editing at the time. Community in the …

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Apophansis Republica (2)

First effect: the erasure of singularity. Second effect: a pattern of necessary associations. Ethical Adjustment #1: Deny all lies, greater truths justify these equivocations. Third Effect: the possibility of insight. Fourth Effect: the emotive response. Ethical Adjustment #2: Enclose the …

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Apophansis Republica (1)

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