2015

Beth Spencer is an award-winning author of poetry and fiction. Her work has frequently been broadcast on ABC-Radio National, and her books include How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House), The Party of Life (Flying Islands), Vagabondage (UWAP) and The Age of Fibs (ebook published by Spineless Wonders and winner of the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award). She lives and writes on Guringai & Darkinjung land on the NSW Central Coast; she has a website at www.bethspencer.com, and can be found on social media @bethspen

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

The Party of Life

trans Ruby Chen, Iris Fan Xing

I am delighted to be a part of the ASM/Flying Islands/Cerberus Pocket series of bilingual (English and Chinese) poetry books with this special collection of new and selected poems called The Party of Life.

These poems and prose poems were selected and translated into Mandarin by Ruby Chen, with additional translations by Iris Fan.

The Party of Life explores love, death, family, gender, sexuality, class and belonging. It is also about what is left unsaid — the gaps and juxtapositions — within and through which we create meaning and relationship.

I am a poet and visual artist who spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor. I think of my work as an intersection of chance with design — a collaboration with the media, painting with light while celebrating the way(s) pigment takes to surface, not showing or telling so much as opening a space for a play of possibility.

am interested in the way light breaks on edge, the way pigment takes to surface, the way words tumble out onto the page, the way the eye of the ear sees them.

I find common ground with John Cage when he says “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and (in the same piece, his “Lecture on Nothing”) when he says “Kansas is like nothing on earth.” Kansas, southeastern Colorado, the northeastern corner of New Mexico, the panhandle of Oklahoma, and (especially) the panhandle of Texas – that is where I grew up, and it shaped my eyes like nothing on earth.

I find common ground with Helen Frankenthaler when she embraces chance and lets paint flow on raw canvas to create forms that surprise and invite us to see worlds we would never have seen alone. This leads me to embrace lyric poetry as a form of abstraction (in the way that computer scientists use the term), a simplification (and an interface) that allows us to manipulate complexities below the surface without getting bogged down in them. And it leads me to agree with Georgia O’Keeffe when she says all painting is abstract.

I often find myself spending as much time on what is not there as on what is. This usually means focusing on a single image and letting the whole composition spring up around it — not a narrative but an all at once that evokes a here and now that is, here, now, neither. A likely story is likely to grow out of this when readers and viewers encounter it, but I hope my art always invites more than it contains.

Links: stevenschroeder.org

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

a water planet

Translations:

Song Zijiang 宋子江, Sou Vai Keng 蘇惠琼, Vai Si 維絲

The themes Schroeder takes up in a water planet are important ones—life in a Chinese city, the struggle to find meaning, our ability to take responsibility for history—and occasionally, the poems provide a sharp insight or turn of phrase. Still, many of the themes are handled in a way that seems superficial, and the reader is left feeling that these poems could have been pushed further into something more fresh.

Lou Smith is a Melbourne-based poet of Welsh, Jamaican and English heritage who grew up in Newcastle, NSW. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies both in Australia and overseas including Wasafiri, Mascara Literary Review, A Slow Combusting Hymn, Overland, The Caribbean Writer, Nine Muses Poetry, sx Salon, Soft Surface, and Caribbean Quarterly. Her book riversalt was published by Flying Islands in 2015.

Lou has worked as an editor and proofreader and was the co-founder of independent publisher Breakdown Press, publishers of political poster series and books such as How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief-Making from Across Australia and YOU: some letters from the first five years.

She is currently working on a number of writing projects including two new books of poetry, one of which is set in her hometown of Newcastle during the Great Depression.

Lou has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne where she sometimes teaches.

Links: lousmith.net

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publication

riversalt

In National Library of Australia

Weaving stories of migration, colonisation, and diaspora, riversalt follows my own family’s patterns of migrations from North Wales, England, and Jamaica, to Newcastle, Australia, where I grew up. Inspired by all manner of things including literature, science, personal stories, folklore, and artworks, in the poems we journey through these locations on foot, by car, boat and by plane. The poems in riversalt are both personal and historical, contemplating notions of memory, ‘home’, and belonging, in a meditation on the meaning of ‘place’.

Thanks so much to Tim Ungaro for creating the awesome cover collage from maps of my hometown of Newcastle, NSW, and Rahima Hayes for taking the author photograph so early in the morning!

A huge thank you to Tony Birch for launching riversalt in Melbourne at Brunswick Bound bookshop, and Anwen Crawford for launching the book at The Press Book House in Newcastle.