Steve Brock



Review Short: Chapbooks by Mike Hopkins and Steve Brock

Displaying an impulse that is communitarian and geographic by turns, Mike Hopkins’s Selfish Bastards and Other Poems, and Steve Brock’s Jardin du Luxembourg and Other Poems address the quotidian of the present under the notion that place-based does not necessarily mean place-bound. Brock’s itinerary darts from France to Barcelona, Madrid to San Francisco, to arrival at the Hollywood hotel, taking readers beyond the physical boundaries traditionally ascribed to place and ‘on a walking tour / a literary one’.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Joel Scott Reviews Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology

Book reviews tend to operate according to some kind of comparative drive: which are the writers whose work this resembles; is this work better or worse than those? Where can it be located in a historical system of literary relationships? Leaning on Harold Bloom’s theories of critical paternity testing and an inverted form of child support, this mode of review is supposed to gives us an idea of what the book might be like, whether we should bother reading it, perhaps even whether it should have been published in the first place.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , , , , ,

Review Short: Steve Brock’s Double Glaze

In his most recent collection, Double Glaze, Steve Brock moves the orderly reader from the very public realm of ‘Work’, via ‘The Commute’, to dwell with ‘Writing’ and finally to settle in, arguably the most intimate of registers, ‘Family’. Although poetic work rarely arrives in convenient clusters, a poet’s choice in manuscript arrangement is not arbitrary; it intimates the conceptual webbing informing the collection’s central aesthetic, thematic, and in this case, socio-political, preoccupations.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

One Dozen Ghio: Translations of Ennio Moltedo

Image from Consejo Nacional del Libro y la Lectura Ennio Moltedo Ghio (1931–2012) lived all his life in the cities of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, Chile. His friend, Allan Brown, says that poets like Moltedo may well be known …

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged , , ,

Trilingual Visibility in Our Transpacific: 3 Mapuche Poets

The work of the three Mapuche poets included here – Jaime Huenún, Maribel Mora Curriao and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf – has been drawn from the Tri-lingual Mapuche Poetry Anthology, forthcoming with Interactive Press in later 2013. Poems are presented in …

Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged , , , , , ,

The Lee Marvin Readings: An Evening with Edmund Gwenn

The Lee Marvin Readings has run, off and on, since the 1990s. Its venue has changed a number of times – from Adelaide nightclubs like Supermild, to the Iris Cinema, to the charmingly Zurich-1917, bo-ho De La Catessan and the more robustly hard-drinking and confrontational Dark Horsey bookshop at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, where it now takes place. The sessions have been organised, run, staffed and emceed by poet and art critic Ken Bolton.

Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Cafe Paradiso

I got a job behind the bar at Cafe Paradiso I can tell you it was no paradise I worked with this guy who liked to make short blacks with a rind of lemon he told me that if you …

Posted in 47: NO THEME! | Tagged