Cirrus@Austlit

'To be a man 'is to scrutinise

'all men.

And then lie about it.

'In this striking debut, Jarad Bruinstroop offers a frank and tender exploration of Queer history, art, beauty and pain. These poems delight in the audacious power of vulnerability and the revolutionary potential of Queer joy. With skill and wit, Bruinstroop plumbs the manifold pleasures of language in search of connection, transcendence and home.

'By bearing witness to the lives of Queer people past and present, Reliefs celebrates the resilience of the desiring body and pulses with renewed possibilities' (Publication summary) 

'The long-awaited second collection from the winner of the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.

'In his stunning collection of new poetry, Stuart Barnes reimagines the poetic form and fearlessly explores topics of illness, death, rape, remembrance, ecology and love.

'Like To The Lark is Stuart Barnes's accumulation of lifetime fascinations with music and sound, form and transformation. Beginning with an apparition of a doomed world brooding over itself and ending with a kvelling globe, this collection plunges into seas, scoots across countries and hurtles towards space.' (Publication summary)

'The poems in Mirabilia test the relationship between art and politics. They are ekphrastic poems complicated by historical narrative; or, they are political poems, inspired by artworks. The title poem is a tribute to the pangolin, the world’s most-trafficked mammal implicated, some say, in the evolution of coronavirus.

'Written in Fibonacci syllabics, it is also a reflection on Marianne Moore’s poem The Pangolin w ith its sense of nature’s perpetuity lost in the years since her poem was written. The final sequence Great World Atlas tracks the destructive extent of nuclear testing across the world in the 1960s.

'It was written for Izabela Pluta’s artist’s book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation. The sequence Tongue reflects on da Vinci’s 1478 painting The Benois Madonna , including the circumstances of its creation in the Pazzi conspiracy and the life of Fioretta del Cittadino perhaps the painting’s model who gave birth to the child of the murdered man. Her child was taken; she was written out of the record. In other poems too, Gorton reflects on the experience of the female muse, wife, or mother.' (Publication summary)

'Wild Curious Air is a conversation, a series of readings or observances, full of shiftings: of ideas, words and bodies; through breath and breathlessness; intimacies and desires; ecstatic and dreaming states; and continuous retrievals of memory. It is a book of play and pleasure that acknowledges the global emergencies of the 21st century, as a calling to and a calling up of things, big and small, close and distant, made in language, made while moving among and through the world.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This book has multiple fire exits. This book has too many keys. You can climb through a window into this book. Some of these poems are not on the lease, and you are willing to take it all the way to the Residential Tenancies Authority.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says ‘a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’. These poems ask what proofs of stability we build when our homes and selves are in perpetual flux.

After the Demolition is about rebuilding as much as it is about taking apart. It is about moving, and about moving on – what we leave behind, and what we attach more firmly to ourselves. When a place is gone – because we’ve given the keys back, or because the locks are lopped off – our attachment can drive us towards saudade, nostalgia, replication. We mythologise the flaws of our past haunts and past lives, and this determines the ways we start over when everything is air rights.'

Source: Author's blurb.