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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.

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John Bryan, Love Has Been Liquidated (vol. 1), (Hobgob Press, 2012).

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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.

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Anna Buck, Maybe Street: Selected Poems of Anna Buck, ed. Tim Metcalf, (Ginninderra Press, 2021).

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Buck's poems move with ease from descriptions of seemingly-commonplace events into evocations of grand Jungian-style archetypal myths.

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Peter FitzSimons, Batavia: Betrayal. Shipwreck. Murder. Sexual Slavery. Courage. A Spine-Chilling Chapter in Australian History, (Random House, 2012).

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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.

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Ava Hofmann, THE WOMAN FACTORY, (The Operating System, 2020).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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M; Margo, road road road road road, (Ma Press, 2019).

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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.

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Kristie Shoemaker, Do Graves Get Wifi, (Ghost City Press, 2017).

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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.

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