The History of My Body is a meditation on childhood, adolescence and young adulthood by an emerging Australian female writer. This is a history of the merciless, well-worn path of encounters and accomplices: of family and friends, of education and confusion, of solids, liquids and gas. History traditionally pertains to fact, but the story of the body of Larissa Bird descries no such truth.
Out of Bounds is a sequence of poems in three parts. It is a double story of dislocation that explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist’s experience of migration and motherhood. It draws together the two strands to reveal a subject at pains to re-define herself through language in a space circumscribed by sexuality, culture, and post-colonial politics. Succinct and astonishingly vivid, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form.
Cyclonopedia is theoretical-fiction novel by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani’s work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.
The Trip is the story of Odysseus or Oddy who claims he’s as old as Arfstraya itself. He’s brain-damaged, demented, deluded or just senile. He is an old beer-drinker who has drunk too much grog in his time; he is perpetually down the local pub; indeed, he just about lives there… Or he’s been embittered by all the indignities he’s suffered as a Greek migrant to Arfstraya or he’s telling the truth and he really is one of the Olympian gods, an immortal, a minor deity, a demi- or semi-god who can even remember the dinosaurs… The Trip traverses Australian history, and features some prominent Australian historical personalities on the way.
Black River is the autobiography of a nonexistent personage. Drawing on literary techniques developed by Beckett, Burroughs and Borges, Black River plunges into a violent and surreal world from which the last traces of the gods have vanished. The reader will encounter such creatures as mouthers, pokers, the sucking lady, white curls, the loved one, the magistrate, and the ambassador, presented in spare, relentless prose. The text by Justin Clemens is supplemented with Helen Johnson’s extraordinary collages. Black River is a work of hallucinatory materialism.
The great 13th century Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar is renowned as an author of superb short lyrics written in the Persian language. Dealing with themes of love, passion and mysticism, the versions presented in this book are the first sustained offerings of Attar’s lyric poetry in English. Award-winning Iranian-born poet, Ali Alizadeh, and Persian specialist, Kenneth Avery, have collaborated on this project which aims to bring this remarkably vigorous yet subtle poetry to an English reading audience. The translations are accompanied by the Persian texts themselves, and explanatory notes, and are set in the context of his life and times by an illuminating introductory chapter. An original analysis of Attar’s poetic language and thought is also offered.
