Disassembling A Dancer is a moving, visceral and beautiful chapbook collection from Canadian Australian writer Kyeren Regehr. It paints the tragic landscape of a dancer’s body, the pain, torment and passion and draws us into the sublime drama of ballet. The artwork by Monica Piloni and Lindsay Beal, as well as the woven ballet ribbon for binding, make this book an exquisite visual as well as literary work of art.

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A Fickle Pendulum has five parts to its labyrinth of sites and the movement is a progressive shift from the ancient word to the future perfect. Beginning with Part 1, ‘A Tensile Faith’, I find myself unavoidably wrapped up in an image of a stretched out architectural form that is temporary and unimposing

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Never heavy, Rose Lucas’s voice is measured, paced – on the page and in the ear – with the rhythms of heartbeat or walking. The ‘murk’ of human obsessions and cruelty are suggested subtly, but in such a way that her poetics affirms a kind of grace. Despite its sometime pious or religious overtones, in Lucas’s poetry ‘grace’ itself is a word that the poet risks effectively.

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The Density of Compact Bone will grab readers and take them like on a magic carpet to places known and unknown, it will lead them to thinking and imagining, to seeing themselves reflected in the poems. I am sure they will enjoy every poem, every sentence, every line …

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I want to go straight to the title “In the Room with the She Wolf”. We see here, straight away, the dynamic tensions in Jelena’s writing. Room – domestic, interior, protection. She Wolf – wild, exterior, danger. But it’s not as simple as that. The she wolf in East European symbolism also represents family, the matriarch, the pack leader, the protector.

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We write – we have always written – as a species who have over centuries aimed to elevate ourselves over nature. We write about our planet now with a renewed consciousness. However, the eye and the hand that is capturing it also has a hand in destroying it. Each one of us – some in very small and some in large ways, some knowing and unknowing, some thinking and unthinking – are contributing to it.

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