Cirrus@Austlit

This poem is in three numbered parts.

'Anyone who lives in a rooming house lives in a rooming house for a reason. With Room 8 the reason was obvious and it was only a matter of time before the Office kicked him out. He was Caucasian, approximately 155cm and 75kg, early thirties, with a prominent jaw. Eye colour unknown due to the baseball cap pulled low on his brow. Under that cap there were police and magistrates, psychologists, doctors, family and fellow roomers. He would curse them all aloud, day and night, keeping people awake. To judge by the way he swore at his mother, she was the one who had the most advice for him.' (Introduction)

'Adam Aitken’s memoir, One Hundred Letters Home, is a near-heroic exercise in excavation and reconstruction, travelling as it does from the United Kingdom and Thailand to several cities in Australia, tracing the process through which Aitken uncovers and recovers almost every emotionally-significant fact, memory and thought to do with his parents, and how these have come to affect him.' (Introduction)

'At the heart of Gretchen Shirm’s novel Where the Light Falls is a meditation on silence, and art as of a means of speaking. The novel’s protagonist, Andrew Spruce, is an art photographer who sees “honesty in broken things” (298), choosing subjects that are damaged in some way: a fractured tea cup that has been glued back together, a grown man with a full set of baby teeth, a girl with a paralysed face. Through framing and capturing a broken subject, Andrew is able to transform it—a metaphor for integrating traumatic experiences into reality. Shirm writes, “A photograph could do this: it could make strangeness seem normal and transform it into a thing of beauty” (205). In this novel, the act of representing is ultimately a means of healing.' (Introduction)

'One of the most striking elements of Isabelle Li’s A Chinese Affair is its sense of melancholy. Her inaugural short story collection is comprised of sixteen subtly oppressive tales, divided into four suites; nearly all are starkly told, and haunted by the weight of what remains unarticulated. There is an authorial confidence to A Chinese Affair that belies its existence as a debut collection; showing a restraint that tends to elude many (younger) writers. In fact, I suspect that the collection as a whole may prove to be understated to the point of frustration for many readers: many of the tales are devoid of clear resolutions, startlingly opaque on even the most basic level of narrative...' (Introduction)

'All poetry has unknown quality. The word is essentially an experiment. Each textual construct has multiple realities only restrained by imaginative possibility. In Vice Versa, a significant work of poetic exploration, Arjun Von Caemmerer asks us to journey beyond language convention and form. Any illusion of singular meaning becomes a playful quality on the page, instigating a textual re-think, and ultimately, unconditional reading. His multi-dimensional work negotiates letter, word and syntax in a ludic interrogation of concrete reality and abstract ideas. Along with an active spatial quality, the work deconstructs meaning, and in this dialogue, openly disrupts the orthodox of traditional poetry. Von Caemmerer offers an epigraph of Emily Dickinson; “I dwell in Possibility.../More Numerous of Windows”, almost as if in open invitation.' (Introduction)