Cirrus@Austlit

'When briefing commissioned poets on what I imagined this volume of Tell Me Like You Mean It to embody, I eagerly told them to simply ‘tell me like you mean it’. I didn’t care if it was a declaration, a meditation, a lyric or an ode but bring me the view, the slant, quirk and queer orientation of where you are in this world.

'My aim was to create a space where diverse voices could resonate and find new meanings through their interplay. What emerged was a collection of poems exploring what it means to perceive and be perceived, to interpret and be interpreted. To me, they exemplify a poetics in pursuit of nuance.

'As you read through this collection, consider how each poem offers a distinct perspective, a unique way of seeing and interpreting the world, a poetic voice deeply concerned with understanding the where of its annunciation. Through a triangulation of everyday experiences, observations, and reflections, we are given insight to broader conversations about what it means to live, understand and be misunderstood on Aboriginal lands. Through these poet’s words we are invited to imagine the familiar anew and to continue being concerned about the catastrophic- come-all-too-familiar.' (Introduction)

'From the first moment I listened to stories about the night sky, I fell in love with astronomy and physics. Not just the stars or galaxies but also the why and how of it all.

'What happened before the Big Bang? What are we made of? How will the universe end? I am not a scientist, just eternally curious and have made scientific research the basis for a great deal of my poetry. The cosmos is endlessly fascinating. And writeable.

'I have been fortunate enough to work alongside inspiring scientists and have read and listened to many more. Scientists regularly and successfully use vivid storytelling and poetics, using metaphor to weave into their factual narrative. It can be an indispensable tool, helping us understand something like Newton’s second law of thermodynamics or dark matter.

'Sometimes, adding abstraction (poetry) on top of abstraction (difficult to understand scientific concepts) can feel like you’re going on a side quest. In those splinters of time, I hope you stay with me.

'Physicist Niels Bohr said, ‘What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.’

'With this, I am humbly grateful and thankful to be suspended in language with you.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'After my parents’ dinner parties, I’d pour dregs from wine bottles into saucers for the fairies – white wine for the good ones, red for the wicked. The red always disappeared faster, which I took as proof that naughty people have more fun. I didn’t really believe that fairies drank the wine but equally, I didn’t not believe either.

'As a parent, I am tuning back to that curious magic of childhood; the naive ambivalence that accepts the existence of tooth fairies and flying reindeer; the unadulterated wonder at new things; the unexpected grace of an ibis in flight; the dinosaur shriek of a sulphurcrested cockatoo; the shocking weirdness of a Gymea lily in bloom; the otherworldly-warble of currawongs as dusk settles in.

'Yet, as wonder flows back into my daily life, so too does the creeping realisation that we are living in a time of overlapping and escalating environmental crises. What stories will prepare my son for a future that frightens me? For me, there is no overarching narrative or truth, no heroic figure who will lead us to salvation from this mess we are in. Instead, sense is made from paying attention to the assemblages of people and other animals who we move among on a damaged planet. I read and write and draw to make sense of a world I no longer recognise.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This book is a testament to the idea that if you keep writing, something will form. Some of those shapes will be emojis, goop stains, paper cuts and everyday geometries. Trash and art are incestuous lovers, and I’m hoarding their offspring.

'I’m an ugly talker, screeching like a pissbaby. I know that this book could be described as confessional – a gendered accusation, and a dirty word when trying to evade the constraints of both gender and genre. I’ve never read a poem that didn’t confess anything, didn’t betray the heart of its author. And I’ve never read a cringe-free poem, nor do I want to.

'I was once deemed a basket case, and now that basket is filled with astro fluff, orbited by spinning tornado cows. Now my basket is hitched to a unicycle, discarded at the clown orgy. Now my basket is empty again.

'I’m a naïve artist and a foolish poet. I eat MILF cereal and I have no money. I don’t know how to talk to anyone, much less an imagined reader. I cut and scissor in equal measures, and I encourage you to tear this book apart if you see fit.

'I hope you fall into something sticky within these pages, or lose your keys, or your marbles.

'You are wonderful. Taste my spit.'

Source: Cordite Books.

'The author's playfulness is to the fore in this strange, charming book. It is a game which invites the reader to roll the dice, take a card from the deck, gain points, lose a turn, and, one way or another, advance around a notional game board: a pirate's world of exotic ports, risky encounters, escapades, wonders and the routine of shipboard life, always in the presence of the moody, changeable sea.' (Publication summary)

'Drawing on media such as musical notation, Carruthers writes in vertical verse stanzas that can be read in any direction; recalling the the palindromic poems in the Chinese poetic tradition, they challenge the dominant linear mode of thinking and writing in the West. Z book 3 is the third book in the AXIS series, a lifelong project begun in 2011.' (Publication summary)

'Eh? You want bodies, blood, sex, gore, damning gods, raw uppercuts?

'Why, yes. Pooja Mittal Biswas welcomes you into the ring of identity and the hunt for an honest and rapier self.

'Glove up.' (Publication summary) 

(Publication summary)

'A collection, written in English and Scots, that explores immigration, home and place.

''When I first left my home, the gnawing ache for all I'd left behind - family, friends, my land, my whole life - made me numb and thrawn. Weeping and sobbing - bubblin an greetin, as you would call it in Scotland - would have been too wet and hand-wringy. What I felt was bone-dry and primal; I wanted to drop to my knees, throw my head back and howl. I pined like an animal, without tears.' — Alison Flett

''The people could be poet, family, reader or all of us on this drowning, burning earth. The present could be this moment, or a past so intensely remembered, or a future so powerfully imagined that past, present and future are simultaneously here. We are with a poet who knits intricate patterns of sound and image, line to line.' — Duncan McLean'  (Publication summary)

'In this new collection by a seasoned master, Kim Cheng Boey moves between Singapore and Australia, youth and middle age â" places and times rendered in vivid, sensory detail â" to give a haunting exploration of memory and the emigrant experience: departures and arrivals; family and home; exile, longing and loss.'  (Publication summary)

'Madrid, Spain 2019. The end of the UN Climate Change Conference--another moral failure on the part of those who could have made change. I go back to the labour union hall that all the activist groups have been using as a headquarters to help with the clean-up. There are only a few of us left. I take on the communal kitchen and bin heads of broccoli gone to dusty seed and half-used jars of slimy lima beans. I wash towers of greasy plastic cups with cold water and floor cleaner, because that's all there is. The door to the room that held the expensive sound equipment has been broken--no, not just broken, but thoroughly smashed. There is talk of a missing key, something lost in translation. The word 'smithereens' comes to mind.

'In a back room littered with cardboard and paint tins, I find a giant papier-mache head of a grandmother that First Nations activists fashioned for their part in the climate march. Alone in the echoing halls, it feels like silence and time are demanding something of me--an act of great care--though I don't know how to rise to it. The crisis is upon us, but abstraction is a bulwark; deafness, everywhere. We have come to an edge. I want to find a way of taking the truth into my body, and then putting it down into the ground. From somewhere offstage, a misery of voices starts to murmur in the scrounge. What starts up is a grief work. I wrap the grandmother head in a pall of plastic sheeting and carry it across the city to Desperate Literature bookshop in the rain.' (Publication summary)

'This volume of Tell Me Like You Mean It marks its fifth year. Whenever a half-decade mark is reached, I do feel the impulse to reflect on the past. In 2017, Tell Me Like You Mean It was edited by Melody Paloma and Mikaila Hanman Siegersma. From 2018–2019, Melody edited alone until 2020, when Susie Anderson took the reins. This year, in 2021, I have been trusted with the series. It seems significant to note that both Susie and I were published in volume 2, the necessary connection there.' (Publication introduction)

'My poems are visual representations of reading. In our culture, this activity is usually silent and optically complex. Conventional meanings are often simple compared to the actual signs and their contexts, which in turn are rarely exploited for poetic potential. My usual way of dealing with this seems simple in retrospect: I imagine the context of the linguistic event, and within that make one gesture. So: one sequence, one page, one word, one letter; often all of the ‘ones’ together. To work through an idea may take many separate gestures, producing something like variations.

'I have made poems using a range of materials: plastic letters, dry-transfer letters, sticky vinyls, MDF cut-outs; and methods: silk-screen printing, photocopying, mechanical and electric typewriters. Since the advent of the PC, most of my work is on the computer. The individual sequences in this book are usually printed on loose A4 pages, tucked into plastic folders. –Alex Selenitsch'

Source : publisher's blurb

''The only Sundays I looked forward to were spent with my beloved Australian nanna Kathleen Mary McCarthy. I would sit with Nanna McC — listening to her stories unwind — and watch her pickle onions and brew ginger beer for Sister Kate's fete. She always cared for unloved and unwanted orphans. She would send me out to play with them. I didn't understand that I was playing with stolen children. I used to think Nanna McC was a kind of saint. I knew she was sent into service as a domestic slave, but it was not until that moment I understood that she was a Bush Mary.' — Teena McCarthy' (Publication summary)

‘Making the wings was a joyful process that continues my explorations of symmetry and asymmetry.’ — Catherine Vidler

'Created with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Paint, visual poet Catherine Vidler’s ‘wings’ — at once playful and ominous — multiply and develop across this enigmatic and wordless collection.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The old hill near where I grew up was outwardly ruined: its pines were dead, its vines gone to seed and its sheds, which once held some purpose, sunk and rusted. With my immature logic I considered this place open and powerful, even though the land was enclosed by a wire fence and fallow from overcultivation and neglect. Like other places in the world, the traces of colonial settlement here held dull, sour feelings. The entire place seemed displaced from itself; maybe nothing could belong there.

'Writing these poems has something to do with being in lands like this. As a child that hill gave me my first feeling of personal privacy, even though it was open, even though it was fenced for someone else, and perhaps because the fence was there. The poems here express indignation at the eventual consequences of privacy. Yet, equally, privacy fascinates me. Equally, fences fascinate me – their lines, their tensions, their bending. I am not the first to say that poetry is a form of enclosure, but I want to say it here again, anyway. I love how permeable this form of enclosure can be. In the same way, I loved how the fence around that private hill would bend as I moved through it.

'–Lucy Van'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Held under an incorrect adverb, the slowness of this book is expressed as intransigent buffering and refusal of optimisation. A syrupy coherence runs through these poems; passing thoughts and bits of language stick to their surfaces. The book is shaped by a stubborn commitment to inclusive imprecision which seeks companionship with error and with the grit and offcuts we collect in the course of living.

'Objects of the industrial world are beheld in their strangeness and excess. An awareness of the hands, machines and historic forces that produce our material realities directs these poems, along with the attempt to understand that objects arrive with afterlives and consequences.

'Archive-shuffling was a useful model for writing, one that was connected to a desire to amplify minor histories and attend to the technologies of connection that wire, thread and beam us into the present. Voices drop out, a phrase is misremembered, the test pattern is the viewing event. If there’s static on the line it’s a happy bit of chance, an instructive interruption.

'A go-slow is a pointed withdrawal of effort, as well as a chance to cultivate pleasure in slackness. Does a state of continued slowness become atrophy? Perhaps this explains the instances of breakage and depletion. The poems in Slowlier are propelled by the oscillation between an acquiescence which can only wryly index decline, and the desire to use the poem to scaffold and energise activities that kick against the logic of inevitability.

'–Ella O'Keefe'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'With the glorious task of commissioning writers for a new collection of sincere, heartfelt writing for Tell Me Like You Mean It volume 4, I found it took longer than usual.' (Introduction)