Criticism

Literary Migrations

My review-essay on Omar Sakr’s novel Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022). The review reads the novel through Sakr’s poetry, and in relation to its critical reception in Australia. It was published in the Sydney Review of Books in May 2023.

Squares and Rectangles

My review of three new poetry collections that feature prose poetry: Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, 2022), John Foulcher’s Dancing with Stephen Hawking (Pitt Street Poetry, 2021), and Misbah Wolf’s Carapace (Vagabond Press, 2022). The review was published in the March 2023 issue of Australian Book Review.

The World Deanimated

My review of Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose (Duke UP, 2022), edited by Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew — an essay collection in honour of the interdisciplinary ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose, published in the September 2022 issue of Australian Book Review.

Lyric Provocations

My review of Evelyn Araluen’s début poetry collection Dropbear (UQP, 2021) and Eunice Andrada’s second poetry collection TAKE CARE (Giramondo 2021), published in the November 2021 issue of Australian Book Review.

Syntactical Torque

A review-essay for the Sydney Review of Books, on Jaya Savige’s third full-length poetry collection, Change Machine (UQP, 2020).

Archives of Loss

My review of a new anthology of Australian essays on the Anthropocene, titled Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis (NewSouth Books, 2020). This is the third of three reviews in my 2020 Emerging Critics Fellowship with the Sydney Review of Books.

Wrong is Wrong

My review of John Kinsella's new memoir, Displaced: A Rural Life (Transit Lounge, 2020). This is the second of three reviews in my 2020 Emerging Critics Fellowship with the Sydney Review of Books.

The Ash of Song After the Flame

My review of Western Australian poet Caitlin Maling's collection Fish Song (Fremantle Press, 2019). This is the first of three reviews in my 2020 Emerging Critics Fellowship with the Sydney Review of Books.

The Performance of Biographical Erasure

A review of an audio adaptation of Jessica Wilkinson's biographical collection of poetry, marionette: a biography of Miss Marion Davies (Vagabond Press, 2012), published in Text Journal, May 2019.

Restlessly Real

A review of Jill Jones' eleventh book of poetry, Viva the Real (UQP, 2018), in Plumwood Mountain, an Australian journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

A feature review of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Collected Poems 1969-2015, published in Australia by Giramondo (2016).

Peter Boyle’s Ghostspeaking

A feature review of Peter Boyle's Ghostspeaking (Vagabond Press, 2016) which situates Boyle among other writers who have used heteronyms in their work - particularly Fernando Pessoa.

Maria Takolander’s The End of the World

A review of Maria Takolander’s book of poems The End of the World (Giramondo, 2014) published in Rabbit 13, 2014, pp. 88-94.

Maria Takolander’s The Double

A review of Takolander’s short story collection (Text, 2013), with a focus on doppelgängers and doubling in the work.

Scholarship

Confessional Surrealist Feminist: Vicki Viidikas's Poetics and Politics (JASAL, 2018)

This article seeks to illuminate the entwined aesthetics of Vicki Viidikas’s poetry. Viidikas was a Sydney poet: she lived in Balmain, and spent long periods of time in India later in life. She was part of the generation of ‘68, which revelled in the countercultural spirit of the 1960s and 70s. Viidikas published three books of poetry in her lifetime: Condition Red (1973), Knäbel (1978), and India Ink (1984), as well as a book of short stories and prose poems, Wrappings (1974). Between 1985 and 1998 she published only a handful of poems in journals; India Ink would be her last book. The essay uses formative aesthetic, political, and material influences to read Viidikas’s work from 1973 to 1998. I argue that there are three major aspects in Viidikas’s poetry: the confessional, the surrealist, and the feminist. By contextualising her work in the confessional poetry genre, the surrealism of André Breton, and second wave feminism, I show that these aspects interact and overlap in subtle ways in her poems. Viidikas was steeped in feminist ideals for women’s writing, and was committed to representing female subjectivity in highly personal and uncensored ways. I show that in her poetry, a feminist ethos energises both her confessional voice and her surrealism. I also pay attention to the material circumstances of her poetry’s production, and the social and aesthetic practices of the generation of ‘68. This situated reading of Viidikas’s poetry allows me to look to the last 14 years of her life, when she retreated from publishing. While critics typically focus on her drug addiction in explaining her later marginalisation, I posit that the anti-capitalist values that Viidikas absorbed in her youth played a significant role in her withdrawal, in the 1980s and 90s, from the literary networks that had previously sustained her.

A Political Radio Poetics: Ouyang Yu's Poetry and its Adaptation on ABC Radio National's Poetica (Cultural Studies Review, 2017)

'Ouyang Yu' was an episode that aired on ABC Radio National's Poetica, a weekly program broadcast across Australia from 1997 to 2014. The episode featured readings of poetry by the contemporary Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu, read by the poet and by the actor Brant Eustace. These readings were embedded in rich soundscapes, and framed by interviews with the poet on the thematic contexts for the poems. In this article I treat 'Ouyang Yu' as an adaptation of Ouyang's work, in Linda Hutcheon's sense of the term. I examine how Ouyang's poetry has been adapted for a national audience, and pay particular attention to how contemporary political discourses of nationhood have influenced the episode's adaptations. For Poetica existed within an institution – the ABC – whose culture had a bearing on its programming, and the ABC was in turn influenced by, and sought to influence, the wider social and political culture in Australia.

John Forbes, the Australian Poet: Representations of National Identity in 'A Layered Event' on ABC Radio National (Adaptation, 2016)

John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called ‘generation of 68’ who were deeply influenced by contemporary American poetics and culture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s Radio National paid tribute to Forbes’s life and work in 1999, in the posthumous radio adaptation ‘A Layered Event’. This article analyses representations of national identity in ‘A Layered Event’, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the ‘arboreal’ or unified versus the ‘rhizomic’ or networked. I argue that, through edited biographical interviews on the one hand, and adaptations of Forbes’s poems on the other, A Layered Event cultivates two distinct images of national identity – arboreal and rhizomic – and that it plays these off against each other. The article asks why Forbes and Forbes’s work is represented in these ways in the program. I use this reading of ‘A Layered Event’ to reflect on the ABC’s role as a national public service broadcaster at the turn of the millennium. I argue that ‘A Layered Event’’s handling of national representations may be read as an allegory for the ABC’s negotiation of its Charter aim to ‘contribute to a sense of national identity’, in an age of increasingly trans-national and fragmented identities and audiences.

Whose Voice? The Author Function of Lyric Poetry on the Radio (Voice/Presence/Absence, UTS ePress, 2014)

This chapter moves from the recognition that there is a lack of scholarship on subjectivity, as it is manifested in the radio voice reading lyric poetry, towards a theoretical framework that may enable such thinking. I review approaches to subjectivity in the written lyric poem, as well as to subjectivity in the radio voice, and argue that in the latter, the dominant concepts of authenticity and (dis)embodiment are inadequate to theorising subjectivity in the radio voice reading lyric poetry. I argue that Foucault's concept of the author function could, instead, be used to frame the radio voice reading lyric poetry; this is an extension of Foucault's concept, which originally referred to textual voice. In this chapter I use it to frame voiced text, and the way that voiced text manifests subjectivity in lyric poetry on the radio.

Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Indian English Poetry (Pockets of Change: Adaptation and Cultural Transition, Lexington Books, 2011)

This chapter focuses on a period of cultural transition in Indian English poetry. In the mid- to late-twentieth century, Indian poets writing in English sought to adapt the English language to India in their work. They sought to ‘Indian-ise’ English, claiming it as their own poetic language. This chapter also examines the impact of that adaptation on contemporary Indian English poetry, where colonisation is no longer the dominant concern. I argue that we ought to broaden our reading of contemporary Indian English poetry beyond the coloniser/colonised binary, through the concepts of vernacularism (being rooted in the local) and cosmopolitanism (engaging with culture trans-nationally). The use of these concepts, as critical frameworks, reveals in the poetry new attitudes towards English, and to the notion of authenticity: while place continues to be an important cultural identifier in contemporary Indian English poetry, poetic expressions of ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ cultures are becoming increasingly complex.

Interviews

‘Myth is Not Merely Decorative’: Michelle Cahill, 2018

The subject of this interview is Cahill’s second book of poems, Vishvarūpa. In Vishvarūpa Cahill takes Hindu gods and goddesses and drops them into suburban Sydney, and into various Indian cities. We spoke about a range of subjects in relation to the collection, including cultural identity, feminism, and travel, but with a particular focus on Cahill’s poetic adaptations of Hindu mythology in the book. This is our complete interview; I used parts of its audio recording in a production for ABC Radio National, which you can listen to here.

Mike Ladd on ABC Radio National's Poetica (1997-2014), 2017

Poetica was a weekly poetry show broadcast on ABC Radio National from 1997 to 2014. My PhD thesis looks specifically at Poetica’s representations of Australian identity in its episodes on Australian poets, but in this interview I took a broader look at the program. Ladd and I discussed, among other topics, Poetica’s founding; its sonic composition; their use of actors; how they selected Australian poetry; and the program’s contributions to Australian literary culture.

Maria Takolander, 2015

The complete transcript of my interview with the Australian poet, short story writer, and academic Maria Takolander. I used parts of the interview’s audio recording in this production on ABC Radio National. My interview is focused on Takolander’s poetry, which often dwells on the self, the body, and history.

Amit Chaudhuri on Rabindranath Tagore, 2014

I spoke to Amit Chaudhuri – novelist, poet, critic, and musician – in London. Chaudhuri's book On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today was published by Peter Lang in 2013. The interview is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese translations.

Joan Margarit, 2013 (archived)

Margarit’s first published poetry was in Spanish, in 1963 and 1965. Since 1980 he has established himself as a Catalan poet, and has published more than a dozen books of poetry in Catalan, and translated many into Spanish. Margarit has been translated into English by Anna Crowe. Since 1975, Margarit and his family have lived in Sant Just Desvern on the outskirts of Barcelona, where there is a library named after him. I spoke to him at his home in Sant Just Desvern.

Anjum Hasan, 2010

Hasan is an Indian novelist and editor of the Indian literary magazine The Caravan. Her first two novels – Lunatic In My Head and Big Girl Now – were published by new Melbourne small press Brass Monkey Books. I spoke to Hasan about these two novels.