'A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre-World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne's latest contribution to the verse novel genre. Propelled at times (though never exclusively) by politics, there is of course plenty of room for satire, though the scope of the tales being told ranges from tragedy to tragicomedy to comedy to farce, with all the muses contributing. Given there are over one hundred characters in the cast, this is a book to be seen as a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia.' (Publication summary)
'Alan Wearne’s new book stands somewhere between his other two books with unified narratives. The Nightmarkets was a set of dramatic monologues reflecting on a single story while The Lovemakers investigated the stories of a large set of characters. Mixed Business is seven monologues covering a number of different stories but put together they make up a kind of history of political and social life in the suburbs of Victoria from just before the first World War to just about the present day: let’s say a span of a century. Wearne’s poetry is always about this kind of documenting but the precise topic and the precise mode of approaching it vary.' (Introduction)
'Alan Wearne’s new book stands somewhere between his other two books with unified narratives. The Nightmarkets was a set of dramatic monologues reflecting on a single story while The Lovemakers investigated the stories of a large set of characters. Mixed Business is seven monologues covering a number of different stories but put together they make up a kind of history of political and social life in the suburbs of Victoria from just before the first World War to just about the present day: let’s say a span of a century. Wearne’s poetry is always about this kind of documenting but the precise topic and the precise mode of approaching it vary.' (Introduction)
