Cirrus@Austlit

'Nathan Shepherdson’s new collection, parallel equators is a book in five sections, under the five vowels, and through the five apparatus of one hand. It attempts to return its messages to a sender (or senders) locked somewhere in a haze of accidental truths. Words travel at irregular pace on a walking tour through a dissociative alphabet of concepts and images. Fingernails, silence, glass, leaves, eyelids, absence, lungs, and full stops all become entangled as ‘body types’ in this idiosyncratic language. Patterns repeat the self. Transcriptions of conversations between elegy and memory possess a natural cadence that counts out the oxygen molecules in life’s strange abacus.

'Shepherdson’s poems are snap-fingered mosaics, dry ingredients holding their breath, so as not to sink, as they unexpectedly set on wet paper surfaces. Is Shepherdson a well-grounded, metaphoric-driven pragmatist, or a quiet, well-meaning fantasist, who wanders off each day, towel in hand, to meet Heraclitus for an afternoon swim?' (Publication summary)

'In axolotl waltz, Nathan Shepherdson steers a rusty trolley with its wobbly wheel as he haunts the aisles in the Supermarket of Casual Koans (SOCK). What he can't find, he invents, or at other times puts items back he bought months ago, on their same shelf, unopened. Shepherdson is perhaps an outlier in Australian Poetry â" grows his own punctuation, turns water into accidental wit, stares at the seeds of random ideas with a synthetic light in his eyes. Yet he understands that shadows are the perfect fabric for a new suit or old clothes. It seems the shooting stars he's looking for have blown their headlights. Although he knows they are out there. There is a quiet darkness he weighs by the gram. He understands you need to throw the thing away in order to keep it. Earnestness is not a tune he can hold. Shepherdson has been known to patrol his own thoughts, half a full stop on his head. When he sees he's in trouble he calls out to himself, dives in to save himself, then somehow manages to drag himself (plus the odd poem) back to shore. He lives in the constant reminder of his parent's example, when as a child, they explained to him, "If you have a feather and a stone, you have an alphabet."' (Publication summary)

'Wide River by Jane Frank,  Calanthe Press 2020, was launched by Nathan Shepherdson on 16th August 2020, at the  Under the Greenwood Tree Bookshop and Art Gallery, Tamborine Mountain, Queensland.'

'The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest story of 2020, causing severe and sudden changes that many people could never have imagined. Our Inside Voices is a collection of creative writing that looks beyond quick journalism or abstract statistics to offer deeper reflection on the cultural and social dimensions of the pandemic.

'Writers reflect on how the disease dramatically shaped our ways of living and dying: the abrupt, sometimes subtle, often challenging, changes brought to cultural, economic, and social aspects of everyday life during a global health emergency. Australians at home and abroad, stunned by a sudden shift in priorities as routine habits and occupations were fundamentally disrupted, faced so many changes that even time seemed inconstant.

'Pandemics are biological events with cultural and social implications. We hope (although, in mid-2020, we don’t yet know) that this virus will soon be managed by curative or preventative technologies, but the disease will have infected and killed millions before it is rendered harmless. 

'The voices gathered here are diverse and eloquent, capturing a vivid portrait of the COVID-19 pandemic as it grows towards its initial peak. They also capture various creative ways in which Australians adapt to rapidly changing realities.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Nathan Shepherdson's launch of Pascalle Burton's About the Author is Dead.