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Linda Albertson, Leigh Crowe, Kai Jensen, Glenda-mai Morgan, Peter Storey, Kate Taylor and Sandra Taylor, Chasing The Line: An Anthology from the Back Room, (Well Thumbed Poets, 2022).
Chasing the Line is imbued with Dransfieldian dazzle as a group of poets of Cobargo – the town that stood up to a prime minister – write back to life from the bushfire-ravaged Bega Valley's smoky yet unbroken heart.
Caroline Bird, Ambush at Still Lake, (Carcanet, 2024).
In a quest for the perfect poetic form in which to deliver her Ambush at Still Lake (with vers liber quasi-sonnets, prose poems and even a pantoum all included), Bird’s verse almost-novella is like a caduceus sketched by M.C. Escher during the riot that everyone – just everyone, darling – desperately wants an invitation to this season. Grade: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
John Bryan, Love Has Been Liquidated (vol. 1), (Hobgob Press, 2012).
Riddled with paradoxical and other wormholes, Love Has Been Liquidated (vol. 1) stands as a paean to post-structuralism, loss and the accidental lyricism of spam.
Anna Buck, Maybe Street: Selected Poems of Anna Buck, ed. Tim Metcalf, (Ginninderra Press, 2021).
Buck's poems move with ease from descriptions of seemingly-commonplace events into evocations of grand Jungian-style archetypal myths.
Peter FitzSimons, Batavia: Betrayal. Shipwreck. Murder. Sexual Slavery. Courage. A Spine-Chilling Chapter in Australian History, (Random House, 2012).
Plodding and gauche, FitzSimons' Batavia is as sprawling as its' unwieldy sub-title and a perfect example of a manuscript that should have been repeatedly marked with the sage editorial advice: "show, don't tell". 62% Pass.
Ava Hofmann, THE WOMAN FACTORY, (The Operating System, 2020).
Richly complicates reproductive politics to the extent that a sonnet-spouting rabbit sex-robot might just erupt out of Justice Amy Coney Barrett's forehead. Free coupons in interactive version. Grade(:) ass molds.
Justin T. Hunt, A Tail to Remember: Freiyon Fables, (self-published, 2017); rev. ed. aka Freiyon Fables: Rise to the Challenge - Book One, (Shawline Publishing Group, 2022).
Review by Rosie Wylor-Owen.
Tom Jenks, Spruce, (Blart Books, 2015).
Tom Jenks’ Spruce (adj., n. & vb.) festoons lyrical, surrealistically-connected leis around everything from alpha to omega in the same way that “six bats hang from a solid spruce mug tree” in the collection itself. Jenks is a rare psalmist: every line is a carefully bejewelled votive offering to the Muse.
Caolan Madden, Vast Necrohol, (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018).
If you have a need for mostly epistolary verse that lies at the mash-up of lush Middle English, cancer diagnoses and tales from mmporg realms then Vast Necrohol is for you. Six out of five stars.
M; Margo, road road road road road, (Ma Press, 2019).
Experimental poetry [/] lovers read read read read read road road road road road by M; Margo - an antithetical tango of lyrical hopefulness danced on the edge of narrative intransigence - 5 stars out of V.
Kristie Shoemaker, Do Graves Get Wifi, (Ghost City Press, 2017).
Do Graves Get Wifi answers its titular question with an enigmatic disembodied ‘maybe’. Despite her untimely death aged just twenty-seven I suspect that this will not be the last that we hear from Shoemaker: a poet of the everyday but not an everyday poet.