Year

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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S.K.Kelen

S. K. Kelen (Stephen Kenneth Kelen) is an Australian poet who enjoys hanging around the house philosophically and travelling. His works have been widely published in journals, ezines and newspapers, anthologies and in his books. Kelen’s oeuvre covers a diverse range of styles and subjects, and includes pastorals, satires, sonnets, odes, narratives, haiku, epics, idylls, horror stories, sci-fi, allegories, prophecies, politics, history, love poems, portraits, travel poems, memory, people and places, meditations and ecstasies. A volume of his new and selected poems was published in 2012. His most recent book of poems, A Happening in Hades, was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2020.

Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._K._Kelen

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Yonder Blue Wild

travel and places 1972 – 2017

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Iris Fan Xing 樊星:詞語的南方

Iris Fan Xing is a poet and translator who is interested in language, place, and home. She recently returned to Perth from New York City and is currently working on translations for Giramondo. The following is from an interview with liminal magazine.

I grew up as an only child (like many people my age) in Mainland China. My family relocated to Guangzhou when I was in primary school, so I grew up under the huge influence of Cantonese culture (especially the pop culture from Hong Kong in the late 90s and early 2000s). The primary and secondary education I received were mandatory, rigid, and systematic in the political sense. My parents nurtured my interests in language and literature from when I was a child. I still remember having a braised pork bun and a bowl of plain congee and listening to cassettes of a children’s English learning program at home in the morning when I was in primary school. My earliest contact with poetry was through my mum reading classical Chinese poems to me. Although my parents believed in school education, they also gave me the freedom and liberty to find my own path as long as I passed my grades. I always did better in liberal arts than in maths and science at school. Their relaxed attitude encouraged me to enjoy spending more time in those subjects. My parents never said no to buying books for me. The best birthday present I’ve received was a set of The Complete Novels of Louis Cha from my dad when I was in high school.

In 2018, I moved to New York with my husband when he started his postgraduate studies. It took me quite a while to adjust to the life in this megacity (the biggest I’ve ever lived in so far), to the time difference, and to accept the fact of being so far away from both of our families and friends. But I’m always attracted to the ‘notion’ of New York and what it offers. It means the MET, Village Vanguard, Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, Anthology Film Archives, and the dwellings of many of my arts and culture icons. I’ll always remember the afternoon when we went to see Andrei Rublev at Walter Reade Theatre and saw Patti Smith sitting in a row by herself behind us.

Links: www.liminalmag.com/interviews/iris-fan-xing

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

South of Words

Three books in one, South of Words makes the form of a round trip between various ports of call in China and Western Australia. The English and Chines texts meet in the title poem, at the centre of the book.

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Yao Feng 姚風:在合唱中獨唱

Beijing-born poet Yao Feng (姚风) has lived in Macau for many years, and is currently a professor of Portuguese literature at the University of Macau. His poems have been published in many Chinese and Portuguese literary magazines, in both languages, and sometimes bilingually. He is a translator and founding editor of the magazine Chinese and Western Poetry, and was awarded the prestigious Rougang Poetry Prize in 2005.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Choir Solo

trans Fei Chen, Kit Kelen

Great Wall Capricio and Other Poems

Translators: 客遠文 Kit Kelen, 管婷婷 Karen Kun, 房霞 Fang Xia

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Patrick Dubost

French poet, play and puppet play writer, Is the author of more than 30 books and 2 C.Ds. He studied mathmatics and mucicology. Publishes at age 24, he started to pen poems not only on paper but through sounds in electroacoustic studios as well. (He is one of the founding members of the collective of poets Ecrits-Studio – website : ecritsstudio.free.fr) He is well known for his performances and readings, making his texts to be heard through his voice but also through gestures, transmitting his energy and playng sound tracks he creates for the occasion. His poetry explores metaphisical questions while his eyes linger tenderly on the world. He has been invited to many poetry events in France and abroad. His work has been translated into Albanian, Arabic, Italian, Greek and English. He also writes humorous and falsely naïve books under the pen name of his counterpart and kindred spirit « Armand Le Poête».

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

no need to say anything: preceded by life as a score

sans besoin de rien dire translated Kit Kelen and Béatrice Machet

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Toby Fitch

Toby Fitch is an Australian poet, editor, essayist and teacher. He is the current poetry editor of Overland and a sessional academic in creative writing at the University of Sydney. His six books of poetry include Where Only the Sky had Hung Before and Object Permanence: Selected Calligrammes, while his seventh, Sydney Spleen, is forthcoming with Giramondo Publishing in July 2021. He has lived in Sydney on unceded Gadigal land since the age of 3 but is shortly relocating to Newcastle and Awabakal land.

Links: tobyfitch.net

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

 Ill Lit Pop

In Australian National Library

LL LIT POP pirates lines from poetry, TV and pop music and performs them on some island in the digital swamplands. From ‘bad lip readings’ of canonical poems to melodramatic collages of Twin Peaks scripts and skewed mashups of pop lyrics, these anti-pop poems co-opt subjectivity and copyright, twisting the confected vagaries of pop culture into critical and playful new confections.

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