A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
Stephen Edgar’s newest book is his thirteenth over thirty eight years, and follows from his much acclaimed The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems 2020, which won The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2021.
While the essays are primarily discursive, The Routledge Global Haiku Reader can also be read as an informal anthology aimed at unsettling conventional and often highly defended notions of what haiku is.
How do feminist activism and poetry come together? Through knowing the world’s cruelty, through acting against it, through writing it into you and out of you, so that there is no doubt that both love and hopelessness ride together.
Rapatahana’s focus rests heavily on language – he argues it can be an oppressor and a liberator. Language matters.
One way of distinguishing the short prose poems of Dominique Hecq’s Endgame with No Ending from, say, flash fiction, would be to argue that while flash fiction’s centre of gravity is narrative, for these prose poems, the centre of gravity is language (or writing) itself. This is not to say that Hecq’s poems are just ‘writing about writing’, but that they address or encompass the materialities of language, textuality, and the conditions of possibility for writing.
As a political refugee, Garrido-Salgado is essentially a travelling poet, and his suitcase of words creates and reimagines home through the act of writing a poem. The dilemma of writing a poem is considered from many angles, including the key concern that the dual tools of his trade, Spanish and English, are the language of the coloniser.
Lo reminds us that “Without the woman at the kitchen sink, / nothing is possible”, and exhorts us, “(For goodness sake, pick up a teatowel, start drying!)”
Jane’s poems are the paintings and portraits of a person watching the difficult moments of their life happening. There is always a part of every poet that remains an observer, even at the worst extremity, that stands apart to watch what is happening.
The Light Café is a book in four sections, each headed by a stunning Dickinson quote, and one of the sections is a rain sequence, while elsewhere in the book are cloud sequences together with marvellous imagery of atmospheric effects – all of this rendered, along with the sky, the moon and the sun and the movements of air, with transformative close attention.
Rochford Street Review 