Welcome to the fifth edition of ⇔, a minizine of Australian language art.
Read aloud as ‘if and only if’, this edition features work by Dave Powell.
Look homeward, angels!
Jeremy
The Black Rider
You can view ⇔5 below, or download if and only if 5 – Dave Powell
All works © Dave Powell, 2014
Filed under Black Rider Press, if and only if
Black Rider presents the fifth installment in the Lyrics chapbook series, even if the signal fails by Jill Jones.
Featuring new work as well as previously collected poems in publications such as Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land (Black Rider Press, 2013), ETZ, and Southerly, this new chapbook of seventeen poems will be free to download from the Black Rider Press website.
Jill Jones has published eight full-length books of poetry, most recently The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher and Wattman, 2014) and Ash Is Here, So Are Stars (Walleah Press, 2012).
Thanks to Annette Willis for the beautiful cover art “Heads in Clouds”.
What others have said
“Jill Jones is uniquely capable of adjusting the speed and magnitude of your awareness. She shepherds the reader away from expectations s/he may have thought absolute. In “A Moon, a Myth, a Feeler,” Jones recasts sensory perception out of zones of occupation, prompting a natural question, “What sport brought you out here?”. Her casual/causal irony demands precision of thought. Even accidents cease being accidental. Jones’s prowess renders the titular signal moot, replacing it with full belief in a transcendence that relieves the concept of itself.” – Sheila E. Murphy
“The precise and provocative poems collected in even if the signal fails deconstruct the binary opposition between realism and experimentalism effortlessly, presenting the reader with a complex and compelling take on modern life. Jill Jones’ poems are undeniably of our world, of its gritty materiality and linguistic sophistication, but they are far more refractive than reflective. She is both an acute observer of the world of things and an active participant in transforming our perceptions through words. According to the poems in this fascinating new chapbook, she seeks to ‘mend constructed things’ and ‘find truth among tension’. Even if the signal fails is a terrific new addition to this important contemporary poet’s body of work.” – Ali Alizadeh
Filed under Black Rider presents Lyrics, Black Rider Press
Welcome to the fourth edition of ⇔, a minizine of Australian language art.
Read aloud as ‘if and only if’, this edition features previously unpublished work by Matthew McVeigh.
Look homeward, angels!
Jeremy
The Black Rider
You can view ⇔ 4 below, or download if and only if 4 – Matthew McVeigh
All works © Matthew McVeigh, 2014
Filed under Black Rider Press, if and only if
In 2012 Black Rider Press published the speculative fiction novel My Soul Cried the Spaceman by Levin A. Diatschenko.
One chapter at a time, the Sound of the Black Rider will release an audio book of Levin reading his novel.
Download or stream the prologue of My Soul Cried the Spaceman below. You can buy the ebook on iTunes, Kindle Store and may other stores. Here’s a review.
Levin A. Diatschenko was born in Sydney, and raised in Alice Springs. Though he has lived in most major cities in Australia, he resides in Darwin.
Arnold Zable called him ‘The Kafka of the Outback’. Rak Razam called him ‘The suburban Borges’.
His work has been referred to variously as magical realism, hard-boiled Surrealism, and mystic fable.
Since 2004 Levin has published three novels: The Man Who Never Sleeps, Meta-Detective and The Rooftop Sutras, which was shortlisted for the ‘Northern Territory Book of The Year Award’ in 2010. Levin also produces and edits an independent magazine called The Veil, which is devoted to philosophy, theosophy, mysticism and occultism.
Levin has written one play, Darwin Vs. Matilda; The True History of Australia’s Northern Frontier, which featured in The Darwin Festival, and for a season at the Darwin Entertainment Center. Sometimes he plays guitar and sings for a band called Flugendorf.
Welcome to the third edition of ⇔, a minizine of Australian language art.
Read aloud as ‘if and only if’, this edition features previously unpublished work by Irene Proebsting.
Look homeward, angels!
Jeremy
The Black Rider
You can view ⇔ 3 below, or download if and only if 3 – Irene Proebsting.
All works © Irene Proebsting, 2014
Filed under Black Rider Press, if and only if, Published
Black Rider Presents a reading of Outcrop at the University of Kent tomorrow night. Come for the innovative and significant poetical approaches to land at the crossroads of ecologies and language – featuring readings by Australian poets Laurie Duggan, Michael Farrell and Claire Potter.
Where: Eliot Senior Common Room, University of Kent
When: 6pm – 7pm UTC, Wednesday 22 January 2014
Filed under Black Rider Press
Welcome to the second edition of ⇔, a minizine of Australian language art.
Read aloud as ‘if and only if’, this edition features previously unpublished work by Pete Spence.
Look homeward, angels!
Jeremy
The Black Rider
You can view ⇔ 2 below, or download ⇔ 2 – Pete Spence.
All works © Pete Spence, 2013
⇔
Filed under Black Rider Press, if and only if
Outcrop is a new anthology which collects contemporary radical Australian poetry of land, to be published in July 2013 by Black Rider Press. Delivery of pre-sale purchases will be in July.
Curated by Corey Wakeling and Jeremy Balius, Outcrop transcribes innovative and significant poetical approaches to land at the crossroads of ecologies and language.
The collection, rather than an exhaustive survey, represents a diversity of contemporary Australian radical poetic perspectives. These range from land in content and syntax, to voice, ecology, gesture and land of the body.
These are poetic experiments with landscape and geopolitics, exemplars of radical visions of land.
The anthology is approximately 240 pages in length, with up to 10 pages dedicated to each included poet.
Outcrop features poetry from Louis Armand, Laurie Duggan, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Lionel Fogarty, Keri Glastonbury, Matthew Hall, Fiona Hile, Duncan Hose, Jill Jones, John Kinsella, Astrid Lorange, John Mateer, Peter Minter, Sam Langer, Claire Potter, Pete Spence, Nicola Themistes and Tim Wright.
Outcrop will be launched at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 2013 Conference at Charles Stuart University in Wagga Wagga.
Held in July, the conference’s theme this year is ‘Country’ with a focus on topics which include the reimagining of the antipodes, discussing notions of country, region and location in literature, the sacred and the profane in country and the interaction between the cosmopolitan and the rural.
Outcrop is available at a discounted pre-sale price for the next 10 days only. Save over 20% (including a saving on postage & handling) by pre-ordering Outcrop on Pozible.
Outcrop is available for $20 (inclusive of postage & handling) until 1 June 2013. Once launched at ASAL 2013, ‘Outcrop’ will cost $25 (plus postage & handling).
Also, available for the next 10 days are bundling opportunities, including limited edition printed chapbooks from the Black Rider presents Lyrics chapbook series. This series of chapbooks is usually only available in ebook format. These limited edition printed chapbooks will only be available for purchase as part of the pre-sale of Outcrop and will not be sold again.
For A$30 (inclusive of postage & handling), you can buy a copy of Outcrop at a discounted pre-sale price, plus your choice of one limited edition chapbook of new poetry in the Black Rider present Lyrics series by either Jill Jones, Michael Farrell or Ali Alizadeh.
For A$50 (inclusive of postage & handling), you can buy a copy of Outcrop at a discounted pre-sale price, plus all three limited edition chapbooks of new poetry in the Black Rider presents Lyrics series by Jill Jones, Michael Farrell and Ali Alizadeh.
For A$70 (inclusive of postage & handling), you can buy a copy of Outcrop at a discounted pre-sale price, plus all three limited edition chapbooks of new poetry in the Black Rider presents Lyrics series by Jill Jones, Michael Farrell and Ali Alizadeh, plus a discounted copy of Kirk Marshall’s debut short fiction collection Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories.
And finally, for the most discounted bundle of them all…
For A$80 (inclusive of postage & handling), you can buy a copy of Outcrop at a discounted pre-sale price, plus all three limited edition chapbooks of new poetry in the Black Rider presents Lyrics series by Jill Jones, Michael Farrell and Ali Alizadeh, plus a discounted copy of Kirk Marshall’s debut short fiction collection Carnivalesque, And: Other Stories, plus a discounted copy of Cottonmouth – An Anthology of New Australian Writing.
All pre-sale orders will be delivered after ASAL 2013 in July.
Put your order in for Outcrop – radical Australian poetry of land.
Filed under Australia, Black Rider Press, Poetry
On the last day of 2012 Black Rider Press is proud to announce the release of enjambment sisters present, a new chapbook by Michael Farrell.
You can download the e-chapbook for free from the Black Rider Press website.
Farrell’s enjambment sisters present is a brilliant plaything, it is lithe and agile, it turns and twists and jumps across the room, finally falling in a writhing heap on the rug. It contains all the joys and “sounds [of] the nest”. Reading it will put the melody in you. – Matthew Hall
For M. Hall’s full essay, read the Black Rider Lines post
Filed under Black Rider presents Lyrics, Black Rider Press, Poetry, Published
When reading Michael Farrell’s new collection enjambment sisters present, I find myself casting my mind to the work of Pierre Macherey, whose theory of literary production stressed the inherent incompleteness of the text. That, “the book [or the poem] is not self-sufficient, it is necessarily accompanied by a certain absence, without which it would not exist.”
The collection is, itself, a structure of complexity, demonstrative of both growth and decay; it is at once about the acquisition of words, assembling into the joy of the literary, and at the same time about control, contortion, the finite articulation of syllables, its careful dissection. In Farrell’s collection, then, we find a disarticulation, a pensive joy which attends the simplest utterance.
The challenge of the work is to ascertain the disarticulations of meaning, of a language which is heading in two directions at once, trading the polyvocal utterance, which stresses and strains against the limits of language, for a syntax of response, which dynamically gathers in and infolds relations with other elements.
Farrell’s poems are as set on the acquisition of language as on the construct of the domestic.
(Oedipus the King, Hoicking)
Which, playing with the notions of containment, punishment and the territorial, of the notion of home for one who argues, in ‘Schopenhauer , Ford’:
makes the compossible claim that the lyrical ‘I’, the eyes of the poet, are tied both to the “mouth” as well as to “youth”. That the claims of articulation are tied to the past, to that which might only exist in fragmented utterances, in glimpses, in an uncertain, testing, and experiential wholeness, that allows an apprehension and renewal in retrospect.
The necessary incompleteness of the text means that the reader is a constant in the flux of the collection, a constant brace to its stutter and pulsing language. The forms and patterns break with an unceasing, teasing velocity, to which Farrell’s voice adds a sense of calm lucidity.
The repetitive patterns of ‘Some Enchanted Odding’ and ‘Schopenhauer , Ford’ are reminiscent of Marinetti or Hugo Ball, but the real treasure of Farrell’s work is in casting the world through the eyes of a child. In that, I am reminded of Hejinian’s line: “ I cannot separate lucidity from undressing” which makes a riddle out of a grammatical proposition, characteristic of her work in ‘The Composition of the Cell’.
Farrell’s fantasmic and creative imagining have the whimsy of childhood, “try this donut made out of doll rubber, tarpaper , and seaweed”; “I want to climb ha / lf an a / lpa / ca”; “If I could r / each the star / s”, which strikes me particularly as playing Wittgensteinian language games, to which children render a language malleable, mold it, create with it, stretch it over the world, and hand it back to you. As Gertrude Stein asked in ‘Arthur a Grammar’: “What is the difference between resemblance and grammar. There is none. Grammar is at best an oval ostrich egg and grammar is far better.”
Farrell’s enjambment sisters present is a brilliant plaything, it is lithe and agile, it turns and twists and jumps across the room, finally falling in a writhing heap on the rug. It contains all the joys and “sounds [of] the nest”. Reading it will put the melody in you.
– Matthew Hall
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enajambment sisters present by Michael Farrell will publish as a free download on Monday 31 December 2012. It is the fourth instalment of the Black Rider presents Lyrics series.
Filed under Black Rider Lines, Black Rider presents Lyrics, Black Rider Press, Poetry
We publish like thieves in the night
Spit diction
Am I the Black Rider? Yes. 