Cirrus@Austlit

'Reading Alice Savona’s Self ie feels a bit like taking a vacation inside a palindrome. It’s a wonderful escape, albeit sometimes fraught with all the rocking movement, backwards and forwards, until you aren’t sure what the runes and symbols that make up the words even mean anymore. The deconstructionist postmodern poetics are evocative and relentless throughout Self ie and the self-awareness threaded throughout the entirely intentional linguistic activity is at times dazzling to the point of dizzying.' (Introduction)

'The Owl Inside presents an often haunted and feral, sometimes confessional and domesticated enquiry into what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene. These poems are suffused with musings on the escape to outer space, secret communications between trees, the movements of birds, suburban trampolines, motherhood, midnight wanderings, the climate crisis, motorbikes, affairs, bushfires and barbie dolls, yet in all this lies a quest for what can be found just beyond the material, heading towards the numinous.' (Publication summary)

'Confession: I should not have read Michael Farrell’s launch speech for Oscar Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage before attempting this review. I had a large attack of Bloom’s anxiety of influence, but I simply couldn’t help myself because I truly appreciate Farrell’s wit and (worldly) wisdom. And now the damage is done. I read the speech and now I’m starting to fear I might be involved in this after all: colluding with, if not an active participant in this – Schwartz’s – whole transcendent digital Otherness that I was previously going to perhaps pooh-pooh just a little in this review. Now I only want to state wholeheartedly that both I and all the online avatars within – without? – thoroughly enjoyed reading The Honeymoon Stage. Meanwhile, I’m left to wonder what there is left to say about the entire identity crisis of this collection, let alone the process of creating a type of posthuman internet-based poetics.' (Introduction)

'Approaching new work from such sharp, prolific and often dazzling poets as Magdalena Ball and Petra White is arguably no job for a quiet morning. Both White’s Reading for a Quiet Morning and Ball’s Unmaking Atoms demand (and duly reward) close attention. The perusal of such multi-layered, expansive texts is more suited, perhaps, to the intensity of early evenings, the drawn-out moments of twilight. For there is strident and persistent music erupting from both of these collections; sometimes it might seem serene, but more often the tune that floods out of the text feels more like an intense, liturgical dirge.' (Introduction)

'“In the poem ‘Nuclear’, after stating ‘… Nothing is ever obvious or contained’, Ivy Ireland asks, ‘How can I write / a lyric poem about the micro-needle in the gargantuan multiverse?’ Yet, in a book replete with angels, devils, evolutionary theory, astro-physics, mythology, magpie song, winter flowers, ghost gums, strangler figs, human love and human fear, this is what she does. Never obvious or contained, Porch Light is its own multi-verse of ideas, speculations and puzzlements. It swings from abstract terminology to idiomatic vigour, from doubt to joy, from mind to body. This is exciting writing, exciting reading.”—Brook Emery' (Publication summary)