AustLit

'The Near and the Far presents work in prose and poetry by twenty-one authors who participated in RMIT’s Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange project from 2014. Activities included residencies in Penang, Hoi An and the Yarra Valley where creative writing was produced in solitude in the morning and shared with the group in the afternoon. Apart from the power and beauty of the individual works, the collection has the larger interest of the process, showing what can happen when creativity is prompted, provoked and nurtured in circumstances that are designed in a considered way but also expect the unexpected. This is new work ‘from the Asia-Pacific Region’, a peculiar but seemingly unavoidable bit of nomenclature, used more in Australia than elsewhere, to indicate a geo-political inclusiveness of which Australia desires to be part and a pragmatic flexibility about whether the designation refers to the writer or the story. Many of the authors and their stories are in fact mobile across this notional space, open to new possibilities, as Alice Pung notes in her foreword.' (Introduction)

'Anthony Macris’s collection of short stories is grouped into two sections, ‘Inexperience’ and ‘Quiet Achievers’. Together, these sections offer a sophisticated and compassionate analysis of masculinity in a modern, consumer, capitalist world.' (Introduction)

'For some poets the act of writing poetry is almost all to do with producing polished and finished works, and such poets often write relatively few poems. For example, almost every one of Kenneth Slessor’s one hundred or so poems are conspicuously ‘made’ things, crafted and polished as individual works that stand alone in their own poetic space, reflecting a particular, disciplined poetic sensibility. Other poets may produce such polished works but are as much, or more, concerned with poetry as an ongoing inquiry into and investigation of the resources of language and the ways language constructs and construes meaning.' (Introduction)

'A chapbook of fifteen poems, Kevin Brophy’s Misericordia is part of a multi-form artistic response to the Jubilee of Mercy proclaimed by Pope Francis in 2016. The accompanying DVD records a performance of music, text, Brophy’s poems, and The Faces of Mercy, a tryptych by painter Niké Arrighi Borghese. Michael Campbell’s performance text provides a context for Brophy’s poems by selecting phrases from the Psalms and Pope Francis, the whole set to music by composer George Palmer, and performed by St Mary’s Cathedral Choir, Sydney. The performance is divided into three segments: Despair, Desolation; Pardon, Hope; Mercy, Love.' (Introduction)

'River’s Edge is Owen Bullock’s fourth collection of haiku. I’ve admired many of Bullock’s individual haiku over the years but this is the first of his collections that I’ve read and doing so has led me to seek out his earlier books.' (Introduction)

'Eddie Paterson’s debut collection of poetry, redactor, plays with ideas of what can be said, what isn’t said and what it might be possible to interpret across a variety of modes. While we might think of ‘redaction’ as being primarily concerned with forms of censorship, these poems push and niggle a reader to think laterally about the multiple ways in which the idea of the ‘the blank’ or being blanked out might operate: in terms of self-censorship, as a way of making a particular more generalisable, even as a method for drawing attention to that which might appear to be self-deprecating, cloaked in discretion. The collection after all is titled redactor; these textual clusters are not merely – or not simply – passive victims of a censor’s knife, but in fact are also potentially actors using the technique of redaction as others might use the dash or the white space on a page. Redactor is about the things that are said on the surface, with directness and verve and engagement. It is also about the nuance under the word, the often punning or uncomfortable space levered open by irony or the graphic. (Introduction)

'The List of Last Remaining by Louise Nicholas is a collection full of depth and diversity, a narrative of fractures in time where people and places mirror each other and become windows into the human condition. She combines the craft of poetry with memoir, drawing the reader into intimate moments. From memories of childhood to historical events and reflections on aging, Nicholas weaves a tapestry of experience and meaning-making. There is a circularity to this narrative, which Nicholas begins ‘On the day our parents went out in the boat and didn’t come back’ (9) and ends with ‘the list of last remaining’ (85), and where many of the poems in-between contain fragments of the whole.' (Introduction)