'The Heide Museum's 2011 exhibition Born to Concrete offered a rare opportunity to survey the history of visual poetry—a "hybrid genre … in which linguistic structures support pictorial structures and vice versa"—in Australia from the late 1960s onward (Bohn 100). It included a range of mixed and multimedia pieces, including typewritten texts, collages, prints, sculptures, and found objects, and it featured such figures as Ruth Cowen, Aleks Danko, Jas H. Duke, Peter Murphy, ΠO, Alan Riddell, Alex Selenitsch, and Richard Tipping.' (Introduction)
'A.J. Carruthers has been admirably busy — academic monograph, blog posts for Southerly, a new index of experimental poets on Jacket2, job in Shanghai, daily Tweets. And there is a lot in his project of promoting ‘the Australian avant-garde’ to be sympathetic towards, particularly as a project after his Stave Sightings. But can we make a distinction between his formulation of ‘the Australian avant-garde’ (or its variations such as ‘neo’ and ‘experimental’) and ‘the avant-garde in ‘Australia’’? And how might that matter for suburbanism?' (Introduction)
'Postcolonialism may be defined as a theoretical framework for reading and appreciating cultural production between normative Western "forms of social explanation" and "more complex cultural and political boundaries" that demarcate responses to this normativity (Bhabha 248) As such, this framework has been extremely beneficial for, among other things, introducing and highlighting the work of writers from non-Western cultural backgrounds, particularly Indigenous and multicultural or diasporic writers whose works convey conceptual and aesthetic themes and values at once foreign and responsive to Western European literary modalities. Thanks to postcolonial theory and associated methodologies, a very diverse range of writers from a host of cultural origins and locations has been accepted by and incorporated into most, if not all, Western academic and literary milieus.' (Authors' introduction.)
