6.00pm Tuesday May 15
The Alderman
134 Lygon Street, Brunswick East
Please join Five Islands Press at The Alderman for the launch of Kent MacCarter’s next collection of poetry, California Sweet.
It will be launched by the indefatigable, unsinkable Bella Li. There will be a short reading by Evelyn Araluen, as well as another guest reader still TBC.
Lisa Gorton says— ‘On our roofs Kent MacCarter is dancing. Shimmy, bebop, pogo, he’s climbing billboards to wall-flip up high over parking lots, asphalt vistas, and naturalising heaps of disposable packaging. He’s making a maelstrom up there, sucking it all in. it’s ‘draping sparkle on the troposphere’, it’s giving the republic of letters its republic back ‘& it’s a total fucking gas’.’
John Kinsella says—‘Transcultural and non-national, these poems rip through assumptions and leave us flabbergasted. A generative tension drives word deployment, with words making meaning, developing that ‘genuine strangeness’ that shifts poetic discourse into something differentiated, generative, essential. There’s an accentual and cultural slippage grappling with the ‘new’ in interrogative ways that are beyond satirical — the poet inside and outside what is being critiqued, culpable and also stunned by what is seen. This is a riveting work — compulsive, committed and drop-jawed wondrous’.
Ken Bolton says—
‘Kent having arrived
put down roots
& claimed
‘a spot ring-side’,
some ownership over the territory
If you want to live here
we want to have you, is my attitude’