Poet, writer
Another new poem, out today in Cordite Poetry Review, No Theme issue (thanks Claire Gaskin ed.). It’s about camping, and features goannas and angry teenage siblings.
Image source: Flickr
I’ve been holding off posting this in case it came out of the paywall – but it looks like it’s not going to (ETA Oct 2019 – it’s out of paywall!).
Delighted to have a poem in winter Meanjin:
EXTREMELY EXCITINGLY, ABC Radio National, a.k.a. The Grownup Radio, has produced a special edition of Queer Out Here which includes my reading from Queer Out Here episode 1, Feb 2018, of two poems about place and family estrangement.
The Queer Out Here special edition aired 5am (!) this morning 16/3/2019, and will repeat Sun 17/3 1pm, Thurs 21/3 11.30am. Or the podcast is also up for download.
Text of the poems, which are previously published:
More about Queer Out Here Episode 1:
Image: (Emma Charleston / Jonathan Working)
Excited to have made my first US poetry publication – in Barrow Street 4×2 of all places!
4×2 is the famous Barrow Street’s online journal for poets who have not yet published a collection.
I was one of the dorks giving their summer reading recommendations about the 20min mark in the Meanjin Podcast Episode #6, in which Jonathan Green, Justine Hyde and Robert Lukins are being very charming on the subject of book recommendations:
The book I recommended was Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives.
In an event reminiscent of the time I once confidently asserted I was not attracted to Tom Hiddleston, in March 2017 I wrote a blog post about how I had decided never to write explicitly about my experience of childhood sexual assault.
That was clearly an extinction burst.
My objections were to do with being uncomfortable with misery memoir i.e. the aesthetisisation or commodification of women’s suffering – I needed to have a point other than ‘look at my pain’. I found it here by responding to another piece by Shannon Burns. While it’s Burns’ right to define his own experience, I found a lot of his conclusions deeply misguided.
I’m grateful to Meanjin for their graciousness in giving me an equal platform to comment critically on something they’d published. My piece (content warnings as per the subtitle):
Delight to have a poem, “The Stone”, in the Winter 2017-18 issue of Oxford Poetry.
Delighted to be reading ‘Industry, Melbourne‘, a landscape poem about heavy industry in Melbourne’s west, on the relaunched Meanjin Podcast Episode #1.
Text of the poem also appears on the website:
I also have a second poem, ‘Exile’, in the print edition:
Delighted to have two readings of poems related to family estrangement appear in this audio zine. Apologies for my current asthma-medication Lady-Batman voice!
Artist statement:
Like many queer people, I am estranged from a large part of my family. We were a camping and travelling family, and I have quite a passionate relationship with the places we used to go. But the memory of family is intertwined with the memory of place, so that even when I am literally standing in the beloved place, I still feel that I am in exile. And that’s what these poems are about.
I have an angry poem about Melbourne public transport masturbators up today in Cordite Poetry Review‘s awesome Suburbia issue.
Readers of my twitter may recall this as the poem during whose composition my honour was deeply offended by MS Word suggesting I was trying to write ‘jazzed’ not ‘jizzed’.
