Autoethnographic
Giramondo, $24 pb, 81 pp, 9781920882891
Autoethnographic by Michael Brennan
Michael Brennan has looked into the future in his new poetry collection, Autoethnographic, and come to the obligatory dsytopic conclusions. There is global warming, social breakdown, closed airports and borders, and so on, and, of course, a mysteriously catalytic event – in this case it is called The Great Forgetting. It would be a mistake, though, to think that Brennan is some kind of post-everything Hanrahan, because he and his characters seem to be loving every minute of it. Picaresque, spiky, with an infectious rhythm that makes Brennan’s tangentially connected mini-narratives almost bounce off the page, it collapses a varied collation of literary modes from the past into a dense knot of decay in the near future.
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to contact us.