Jennifer Harrison
Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018). Two new collections, Sideshow History and Finals, are forthcoming in 2025. She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry and won the 2023 Troubadour International Poetry Prize.
The new books from Ron Pretty’s Five Islands Press are impressive début collections. Importantly, where are the poets taking us? Are there discernible trends? Without generalising excessively, violent themes recur and the poets are interested in how societies transgress their limits. The collections have a narrative or developmental thrust often well served by the ordering of the poems. There i ... (read more)
This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. T ... (read more)
The title of Marion May Campbell’s third poetry collection, languish, conjures ideas of laziness, daydream, failure to make progress, ennui, lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia. Campbell’s poetry is concerned with the excitement of language, but also its debasement. Several reviewers have commented on the work’s intertextuality (Campbell often employs compositional strategies such as parody, allus ... (read more)
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~ dots of colour points on a complex number plane where the x horizontal axisrepresents the ‘real’ part number and the vertical y gives us unseenspace the imaginary i x=iy and i2 =-1& ... (read more)
In an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken thi ... (read more)
In the epigraph to this collection, a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on Edmund Husserl suggests that we are entering a poetic that challenges the possibility of conscious knowledge; consciousness is itself a maelstrom that extrudes the intruder and has ‘no inside’. What follows is both a refutation and embracement of this assertion in chatoyant language that is as thoughtful and melodic as it is ... (read more)
after Eavan Boland’s ‘New Territory’
The world closed in, but it was fortunatethere was her own interior to explore:the prayer books a captain might have readon long voyages, now small with gossamer pagesof tiny print, so interesting, myths really,of rise and fall, pride, hedonism and fate,the farmer who could not turn water into wineno matter how hard he tried. And then there weree ... (read more)
I’ve been trying to place lovein the exhibit for inspectionbut there are fees to be perfected.
... (read more)
'If you are going to tell a story, come with some attitude, man'
Miles Dewey Davis III (26 May 1926 – 28 September 1991)
After a ten-year gestation, actor Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda [2004], Crash [2004]) has realised his dream to produce a film on the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis. Cheadle who directs, co-writes, and plays the central role eschews the usual linear narrative in Miles Ahead ... (read more)