Launches
March 11, 2021
Very happy to have a double launch for my books Utterly (Ginninderra Press) and Monstrous (Interactive Press) on Monday. Judith Nangala Crispin launched Utterly from Lajamanu in the Northern Territory by Zoom, and Kaaron Warren launched Monstrous after a fairly probing Q and A session.
What a pleasure to be reading in front of a live audience again at Smiths Alternative in the city (the city being Canberra). The books were published last year, but Covid prevented any live launches or readings.
Utterly can be bought here and Monstrous here. Here’s the cover of Utterly.
Zoom launch of Monstrous
August 5, 2020
Last Sunday was the Zoom launch of Monstrous, my new collection of horror poems. Thank you to the publisher, David Reiter for organising the launch, and to Tim Jones for the launch speech. Also thanks to those who attended, and those who helped with the book, especially Kaaron Warren for the Introduction. If you would like to have a look, the launch is now up on YouTube.
The book is available as a paperback or e-book at many on-line retailers, from the publisher, or, for those in Canberra, direct from me, or at Book Lore in Lyneham.
Monstrous arrival
June 4, 2020
My new poetry collection just arrived from the publishers, Interactive Press. As the title would suggest, it deals with some horrible creatures, from a re-working of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to killer garden gnomes, to sharks that eat suns, to aliens on a nineteenth-century lunar voyage. There’s also the dubious future of the game of cricket. There’s some disturbing stuff, and some humour too.
You can read more about the book here. And it can be ordered here. The print version is postage free to Australia and New Zealand, for a limited time.
Thank you to Kaaron Warren for the Introduction, and to Andrew Galan for providing a blurb. Also to Zoe Hartland for the suitably freaky gnome, and Geoffrey Dunn for the author photo.
I will be launching it sometime in Canberra (and possibly elsewhere), when gatherings become a little more feasible, and I hear that an on-line event for all IP books published this month will be held. David Reiter, the publisher, is organising that.
Of course I wish that the May launch could have occurred, but the book has won through, in all its manic strangeness. I can’t wait to read some of the poems aloud to an actual gathering!
Too busy Toosday
August 22, 2016
I apologise profusely for no original poem today. I am a tad busy at the moment.
Thursday 25th at 7.30, I am reading poetry at Manning Clark House, Tasmania Circle, Griffith. Many of the poems will have first been published on this very blog, or at Project 365 + 1. I will be reading for about 30 minutes, as will Hazel Hall, the other reader. There is an entry fee of $10, I think, which covers wine, some small items of food and the wee literary stuff.
On 27th August (Saturday) I’ll be moderating a discussion on The Poetics of Politics, at the National Library of Australia (a big building by the lake). The immoderators/speakers are Lizz Murphy and Susan Hawthorne, and it happens at 12pm, just after a launch of novelist Kaaron Warren’s new book, The Grief Hole, at the very same library at 11am.
On the 31st August I’ll be going to the launch of Award Winning Australian Writing in Melbourne, and reading a poem, and then attending the announcement of the Australian Catholic University Poetry Competition results the next day. I am short-listed for that, but I don’t think I won a prize this year, for various reasons. Still, they produce a really nice collection of poems short-listed in the competition.
Then I will hopefully get some writing done. Plus I’ll soon be proofreading a new chapbook of poems. More about that later.
Loud man pissing round the reading
with irrelevant comments,
dribbling self, reflected in a deep pool
of his own stewed past, steaming.
He is a true Narcissus,
but not so drop-dead gorgeous;
fungus mated with dead cat.
He smells of yesterday and loss.
He shouts his irrelevance
with every tedious joke,
every punch line a squib,
tarnishing the grey sky.
P.S. Cottier
Not the subject of the poem
A nasty wee poem indeed, based on a couple of True Incidents.
***
On a couple of more positive notes, I’ll be reading a poem or two at Tuesday night’s launch of Suddenly Curving Space Time and meeting Gerald Keaney, one of the editors for the first time. That’s at Smith’s Alternative (aka Smith’s non-Euclidean?), Alinga Street, Civic, at 5pm. There is a bar. I’m not sure if Hal Judge, the other editor, is in the country at the moment, but I will certainly find out.
UPDATE: This launch has been postponed as Gerald is stuck in Brisbane due to ‘freak weather conditions’. I think that means fog! I’ll give new details when I can.
FURTHER UPDATE: The rescheduled time of the Canberra Launch of the Suddenly Curving Space Time anthology of experimental poetry is 9.30pm – 11.30 pm on Thursday 21st July.
Secondly, the usually totally impeccable Kaaron Warren has inexplicably featured me as a guest blogger, chatting about how I refresh my wells. That is what they call a metaphor, I believe. Kaaron is seemingly aiming for a Guinness world record in having quite a few people write on this topic. Seriously, there will be enough material for a Real Book based on these jottings, some of which are very informative and detailed. Some of the contributions One of the contributions is, however, a tad frivolous and involves violence towards naiads.
PS Cottier 