Poetry

These books suggest that all writing can be read in the manner that one reads a poem, that is, with an acute sensitivity to the processes through which meaning is configured in a particular textual event.

Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo…, into that of charismatic megapoems.

Often against my will, but in my imagination, I would force myself to drive into that river, out of it and alongside it.

By juxtaposing the accounts of settlers – who believed that the appropriation, and later purchase, of land was legitimate – with the effects of their occupation on Māori, Hawken highlights the greater struggles of Māori within the European narrative of settlement.

Form can figure as a room you enter or you don’t, usually a very small room, if not the smallest, imagined as staid and stultifying, or worse, suffocating.

Sakr is searching for a poetics that emerges from a wound, from an injury or injuries that draw blood. But as the man ‘who knows his history’ reveals, the poetry Sakr is after is eternally in his blood, signalling blood’s association with tradition, inheritance, and identity.

Archives are unreliable witnesses, especially here on these lands of invasion and occupation.

To discover the work of Michael Farrell is to discover a kind of monkey persistence. It plays out like an…

The little book of sunlight and maggots celebrates nature but it is not nature as a generalised abstraction, as mere backdrop to human activity, or as picturesque landscapes.

In Lew-world the otherworld always presses. There is a valence in Lew’s language, an instilled quality of extra-potentiality, of sinister burgeon.