Cirrus@Austlit

'I Have Decided To Remain Vertical is an exhilarating extension and intensification of some of the major themes of Carbis’s first collection Anecdotal Evidence: her never leaving Carnegie; a family strangely functional in the wake of brokenness, as poesis summons vivid mosaics from the fragments; the devastated heart and the paradoxical sustenance it finds by revisiting the penumbra of relations; the contradiction between word and gesture; the magnetism of the loving body while the erotic body feels cancelled in its relegation to mere companionship, and the fearless probing of domestic anguish in the wake of paternal carelessness.' (Introduction)

'Both these strikingly strong recent poetry publications Body Shell Girl and Inheritance, from Australian poets of feminist inflection, deal at least in part with North American and Canadian experience. While Rose Hunter navigates with a highly effective, raw, and unsentimental diction her often traumatising experience as a sex worker in Toronto and Vancouver, Nellie Le Beau practises an innovative and, at times, a more radically challengingly poetics to send reader perception veering into uncanny encounters with our places in space-time.' (Introduction)

'This new collection of poems by Marion May Campbell furthers her lifelong interest in form, stretching to breaking point the potential of poetic language. She stages language as trickster, traitor and seducer, flamboyantly connecting and wiring the circuitry of desire, just as it silences and slices. One moment, it stutters, teetering on the brink, and the next it transfigures loss in radiant dreamscapes, restoring ardour amongst the ruins of allegory. languish is Campbell’s eleventh book across the forms of fiction, poetry and critical theory. Her writing is always charged by a poetics of feminist contestation.'  (Publication summary)

'She charges space, she rakes and ruffles her cropped and bleached hair, her dark eyes narrow as her thought uncoils with the lasso of smoke from her cigarette, and she moves, lean and feline-slinky in her riot of colours, her pendant earrings swinging, her deep voice booming, laughter welling from the depths. We can’t take our eyes off her, this brilliant magnetic being, as she teaches and entertains – and with Lesley one always implies the other. We’re at Murdoch University, back in 1987-8, then a relatively radical institution, fostering cross-fertilisations amongst the disciplines, and Lesley, a film theorist and critic of growing renown, is also on fire creatively.'(Introduction)

Epigraph:

we are not measure 

we are not measure 

of anything 

Alan Loney