2017

Chris Song 宋子江:自噬之花

Chris Song is a poet, translator and editor based in Hong Kong. He has published four collections of poetry and many volumes of poetry in translation. Song received an “Extraordinary Mention” at Italy’s UNESCO-recognized Nosside World Poetry Prize 2013. He won the Young Artist Award at the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards, presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. In 2019, he won the 5th Haizi Poetry Award. Song is now Executive Director of the Hong Kong International Poetry Nights, Editor-in-Chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and associate series editor of the Association of Stories in Macao. He also serves as an Arts Advisor to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Mirror Me

In National Library of Australia

Chris Song 宋子江:自噬之花 Read More »

Matthew Cheng 鄭政恆:記憶之中

Matthew Cheng 鄭政恆 is a poet and editor and author of the poetry collection The First Book of Recollection, and co-author of Wait and See: The Collection of Six Hong Kong Young Writers, and the editor of An Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry of the 1950s, Hong Kong Short Stories 2004-2005, and Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective 2011, among others. The former Vice-Chair of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society, in 2013 he received the Hong Kong Arts Development Award for Best Artist (Arts Criticism).

biography source https://iwp.uiowa.edu/writers/cheng-ching-hang-matthew

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Recollections

Translation: 宋子江 Chris Song, 客遠文 Kit Kelen, 樊星 Iris Fan Xing and others

Matthew Cheng 鄭政恆:記憶之中 Read More »

Michael Brennan

Michael Brennan was born in Sydney in 1973. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2001, where he wrote his thesis The Impossible Gaze: Robert Adamson and the work of negativity. He is editor of the Australian sector of Poetry International Web and is the co-founder of publisher Vagabond Press.

Brennan has written six individual collections of poetry to date and two collaborative works, with a style described by David McCooey of Jacket Magazine as ‘a strange, sometimes surreal, world, to illustrate the possible foreignness of any place, even home’. 

These are The Imageless World (Salt Publishing 2003), Language Habits (2006) Unanimous Night (Salt Publishing 2008), Autoethnographic (Giramondo Publishing 2012) Alibi (Vagabond Press 2015) and The Earth Here (ASM 2018).

In 2004, Brennan won the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, and, funded by the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts, and a Nancy Keesing studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, he was able to live abroad in both Berlin and Paris. 

Brennan collaborated with Akiko Muto, a Japanese artist, to create his second chapbook titled Sky was sky, which was a dedication to David Brennan, who died in 1999. Sky was translated by Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, and published in 2007. Brennan’s second collaborative work was an art book: Atopia, which was produced with Kay Orchison, a Sydney-based artist.

This biography is an abridged version from wikipedia. To read more about Brennan’s awards and recognition and the connections between his works read the full entry at the following link.

Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brennan_(poet)

The Earth Here

Michael Brennan Read More »

David McAleavey

David McAleavey was born in Kansas in 1946. He has published seven poetry collections, including Sterling 403 (1971), David McAleavey’s Greatest Hits 1971-2000 (2001), and most recently Rock Taught (2016). His honors include a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the GW Award from George Washington University. He currently lives in Arlington, Virginia, and teaches English at GWU.

David updated us a little while ago ‘Greetings. My Flying Islands pocket book is titled Talk Music, and it appeared in early 2018 (copyright date Dec. 2017).

I spent the Fall 2016 semester in a faculty exchange at the University of Macau, part of a short-lived program between UM and my home university, George Washington University in Washington, DC.

I have now retired from GW, effective Fall 2020, as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic: teaching wholly online, with all its imperfections, seeming like more work than pleasure. I’m still adjusting to my new retired status; one of my strategies for exploring the rest of my life includes reducing my involvement in poetry, though I do hope to return to the endeavor, should I recover the motivation.’

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Talk Music

David McAleavey Read More »

Rob Schackne

Born in New York, he lived in many countries until Australia finally took him in. He was a Foreign Expert EFL teacher in China for many years. He now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, where he enjoys the blue skies, fresh air and the birds. There were some extreme sports once; now he plays (mostly) respectable chess and pool. A Moonbeam’s Metamorphosis/The Parachuting Man (with Nicholas Coleman) was published in 1979 by LEFTBANK PORTFOLIOS (Melbourne). He published two poetry collections in Shanghai: Snake Wine (2006) and Where Sound Goes When It’s Done (2010). A Chance of Seasons was published by Flying Island Books in 2017. 
More recently some of his poems have appeared in The AnthillOz Burp (Five) zine, Ariel ChartThe Blue Nib MagazineBluepepperThe Rye Whiskey ReviewPink Cover ZineThe Raw Art ReviewOutlawPoetryHUSK, the Sappho Lives! Anthology (2019, 2020), Taking Shape (Newcastle Poetry at the Pub Anthology, 2018, 2019, 2020), and the Messages From The Embers bushfire anthology (Black Quill Press, 2020). 
When he’s not writing, he likes taking photographs. He listens to the Grateful Dead. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

A Chance of Seasons

Rob Schackne Read More »

Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang

Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang was a nomad writer and translator before finally settling in in Southern Sweden. He started writing professionally – as a journalist – at an early age of 12, mainly motivated by an innocent wish of seeing his name printed in newspaper. After writing a number of short stories for various newspapers, he published two novels in 2006.
In 2013, he got involved with Flying Islands and started translating Iman Budhi Santosa’s poems (Faces of Java) into English. He was then granted Indonesian government funding for a poetry translation project in 2015. His own collection of bilingual poems, Encounters: Never Random, was published in 2017 by Flying Islands.

He is currently teaching Creative Writing in Malmö University, Sweden and at the same time trying to get back to a poet mode.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Encounters: Never Random

Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang Read More »

Robert Wood

Robert Wood is a poet and essayist living in Redgate, Western Australia. His writing focuses on our relationship with the natural world and draws on his experiences of country, suburb and city to create mythic landscapes informed by history and philosophy.

Robert has worked for Australian Poetry, edited for Overland, Peril and Cordite, been a columnist for Cultural Weekly and was the first poet on the faculty of The School of Life. He just signed his first official book contract for History and the Poet

Links: www.liminalmag.com/interviews/robert-wood

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Concerning A Farm

In National Library of Australia

Concerning a Farm, a collection of fifty eight, mainly short, free verse poems, is a pocket sized volume, but shows large ambition and breadth. It is the third book published by Robert Wood, the Western Australian poet whose previous publications are History & the Poet: Essays on Australian Poetry, and Land Mass, a hundred page poetic history of Australia.

See review by Lyn Chatham plumwoodmountain.com/lyn-chatham-reviews-concerning-a-farm-by-robert-wood

Robert Wood Read More »

Kerri Shying

Kerri Shying is a poet of Chinese, Australian and Wiradjuri heritage who recently published sing out when you want me, a poetry collection that arose from receiving a Writing NSW Early Career Writer Grant in 2016. Membership & development officer Sherry Landow caught up with Kerri about the collection and other writing projects.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Knitting Mangrove Roots

In National Library of Australia

Kerri Shying’s poetry taps into a very rich vein of experience. The work draws the reader in like an old friend, combining nourishing warmth with a subtle, snarky humour so precise, you can’t help laughing out loud. Knitting Mangrove Roots is Shying’s third book of poetry. The cover features a handmade “scarecrow” that is both homely and exotic, which is a good description of the poetry in this work. Though the book is the handsome pocket-size that Flying Island Books have become known for, Knitting Mangrove Roots is very much a full length collection. There are 86 poems in quite small text, each following the “elevensies” form that Shying invented and used to good effect in her book Elevensies, published in 2018 as part of Puncher and Wattman’s Slow Loris series. The form involves poems of eleven lines, with a jutting, italicised title in the middle separating the first and last parts. There is no punctuation, and everything is in lower case which gives the poems a soft quality that underlines Shying’s sharp vision. The unique structure of these poems presents a continuum from piece to piece as the title leans out towards the next poem. It almost feels as those these italicised titles form their own poem working simultaneously with the other pieces and sitting outside perimeter of the page. Each poem is short enough to read quickly and dense enough to savour through multiple re-readings.

sing out when you want me

“sing out when you need me is a powerful collection which reads easily but continues to reveal secrets and expand outward with each re-reading. The mostly short poems stay with you, becoming little charms against all of our inevitable deteriorations. It is all about “keeping going” which, in the face of pain, poverty, confinement, medical visits, the poking and prodding of life itself, becomes a heroic, transcendent act:”

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball Compulsive Reader June 2018

Kerri Shying Read More »