Search

AMELIA WALKER Alogopoiesis Sydney. Life Before Man Press. 2023.340 pages. IN A LONG BOOK that altogether forgoes page numbers, early on readers encounter a set of lines conjuring a mouth [...]

SIN YONG-MOK Concealed Words Trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé. Boston. Black Ocean. 2022. 88 pages. SURELY SIN YONG-MOK is a humanist, albeit complexly so, his dreamlike free-verse poems both ferociously [...]

Jordie Albiston Fifteeners Waratah, Australia. Puncher & Wattmann. 2021. 98 pages. FIFTEENERS IS THE latest stunning installment in this storied poet's fearless oeuvre, and Jordie Albiston's book of strangest deformations [...]

Charmaine Papertalk Green Nganajungu Yagu Melbourne. Cordite Books. 2019. 73 pages. BEFORE OPENING Nganajungu Yagu, readers see the image of an old-fashioned suitcase over which the author's name and book's [...]

Alison WhittakerBlakwork Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 179 pages.This discursively monumental debut collection asserts unwavering pressure on the idea of 'Australia'; from within colonially bounded domains, where 'One Nation [...]

In previous papers, I have sought to usher Creative Writing in English into Literary Studies contexts in Korea by responding to rhetorical questions, such as "[h]ow to begin to feel like ourselves in a language we do not quite feel at home in?" (Disney 2011: 7) and, erroneously, "how might [students] do something materially akin to [western] canonical texts set before them" (Disney 2014: 3). On reflection, and after more than a decade in Korea, it is wholly apparent just how uncritically these questions centralize English and, therein, my own unchecked entitlement. Both questions remain as if ethically indifferent to the inherent inter-linguistic, trans-cultural power relations at play within Creative Writing in Non-Native Language contexts (herewith, "CW[SL]"). When calling our attention to the fact that "there is something amoral about teaching English Creative Writing in Asia" (52), writer, researcher, and educator Xu Xi issues a direct challenge: how are native-speaking English-language writer-scholars to be more than unwitting avatars of privilege, performing vectors of dominance (Ritzer 204) in a first language among non-native language-learning writer-students? One suspects answers may well be located inside languages other than English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adam Aitken Revenants Sydney. Giramondo. 2022. 96 pages. BEFORE OPENING THIS book, I kept picturing Leonardo DiCaprio fending off a lunging set of teeth and claws, alone in a North [...]

In one of Alice Munro's longer stories, the metafictional 'Fiction', readers encounter a series of contingent narratives in which characters exert explicit, self-constructing expressive labours. The text is split into two sections: in the first, the protagonist Joyce is betrayed by her husband, Jon and her life momentarily falls to pieces. In the second section, decades later, Joyce is remarried, surrounded by friends and family, her life replenished and thriving. A gamut of fictions suffuses this text, as if Munro's scenes are case studies delivering heuristic knowledge and Joyce's self-narrativizations act as if a generative mode of self-care (the talking cure for one, as such). At heart, Munro seems to explore for the possible functions of fiction: through Joyce's example, it seems that part of the work of fiction remains intra-personal, in this text a means by which to switch trauma off. Joyce's mind is shown to work in anti-repressive modes, creating clearly narrativized lines of self-understanding which, in this case, enable the protagonist to literally come to terms with a self-told story placing at the denouement her own blamelessness. Herewith, 'Fiction' can be read as a complexly woven narrative on modes of narrativization, Munro seemingly implying that memories retold and reframed are a functional gestalt enabling some to become more than the sum of past traumas. Through accepting that life sometimes can be as positively strange as fiction, Joyce is able finally to both rejoice and (as it were) re-Joyce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In augmenting the illusion of reality with moments of aesthetic alterity, the avant-garde serves its communities through representing to mass culture that which is uncanny, unconscious or forgotten. In dying [...]

The poem "Coronation" by Dan Disney is presented. First Line: & we're veering through industrial mist; Last Line: water trickle itself over lumps of displaced stone.

The article presents the discussion on documents forming the canon of Korean sovereignty where neighbouring states continue to contest and claim.