This page lists the books I have published, including publications as author, as editor or co-editor, and as publisher. You can find a full list of individual poems, articles and reviews, both in print and online, on my publications page. If you’re really desperate, peruse my performance page.
Books As author
We Will Disappear
2007
Over ten years in the making, my debut poetry collection We Will Disappear was released in August 2007 through soi3, an imprint of papertiger media. The book features approximately fifty poems, including some that have already been published, both online and in print, and others no one even knew existed. The cover image was taken by me in a West Melbourne warehouse in 1999, around the time I first started toying with the idea of this collection. The book was successfully launched at the 2007 Melbourne Writers Festival and the 2007 Queensland Poetry Festival.
Track listing:
[envoi]
In a Dim Sea Nation
Abstract Moon
We Will Disappear
(On the Tomb of) Victor Bruce
Northern Rivers Pastoral
While Your Children Are Small
In Heaven It’s Always Raining
Avalon V
Airliner
Post-Holocaust Tram
Between Empires
1001 Nights
Dexedrine Bombs
When We Were in the Wild
Lovers / Lateness
Ada
Ken
Japanese Bush Poet
The Happy Farang
Non-Touristic Trek
Tintin & the Plain of Jars
The Chao Le
Ich Bin Ein Tourist
Od(e)
Entgegengesetz
Fassbar
Kerze 1
We Miss You!
Spring*
Peace Falls
Bustling
A Veteran of the Club Scene
Identikit Nation
City Slacker
There’s a Wild Jack Russell in the Moon
The Bloody Hollys
Ma Sonic
Code Pervin�
Let’s Fight the Pop-Ups!
Machines for Living In
Search Poem #9
Kyoto Crow(s)
Betty Conquers All
Silver Rocket II
‘Wounded or Sound’: The Death March of Johnny McQueen
Karin Revisited
Unmarked Harlem
She Finds Her Speed
The Rise & Fall of Davey Dreamnation
(On the Tomb of) The Unknown Waitress
We Are Living
Caroline
5 Haiku SMS
Read more about the book, including reviews, cover images and the beauty of incunabula!!
Morgenland
2007
Even as the dust began to settle on We Will Disappear, in late 2007 I published a chapbook through the highly-esteemed Vagabond Press. The chapbook is called Morgenland and it contains 19 poems. Only 100 copies of this little gem have been produced, and each one has been signed and numbered by moi. I only have ten four of these to sell, and at AUD$15 (including postage and handling within Australia), that’s a steal.
Track listing:
Alone In An Airport II
Jetlag World
Sound of Vitality
White Space
Snow Grocer
Hoju Bihang-gi
Nagasaki Crows
Trans*
The Hanok Fields
Drunk As Ko Un
Makkolli Moon
Mokochukcha
Saihou Jodu
Imaginary Mao
Snow Sea Swan
Lonely Planet
Icebergs
Moriapo
Back To The Tourist III
Read more about my Asialink residency.
View the complete set of Morgenland drafts online.
Read about my Imaginary Cities: PC Bangs project.
Abendland
2006
In 2006 I bit the bullet and pumped out a few copies of a little book of poems I wrote while travelling through the USA and Europe in 2005. “Abendland” refers to the old-fashioned name for “the West” or “evening-land”; with “Morgenland” or “morning-land” being its eastern opposite. The book contains about twenty poems but I wrote more than seventy during my travels. As I was travelling at the time in various places including the USA, Ireland, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Germany, Belgium, England and The Netherlands, the poems obviously have a travelogue flavour. Writing while travelling for such an extended period of time also changed my writing practice - these poems were the first I had written by hand for several years, and were typed up only when I arrived in Korea in September 2005. Seeing as this book si more recent than The Happy Farang, I’m only asking $500,000 per copy. That’s a steal in anyone’s language.
Track listing:
Yo La Tengo
Walt Whitman Service Area
Fir
Mna
18 Fields
Gorazde
Death In Dubrovnik
The Two Faces of Zlatyu Boyadziev
Mit Gas!
Pigtails
Baudelaire in Bruxelles
Pink City
Kathy Kruse
Abandoned Youth Camp
Durer: Innsbruck 2005
Dachau
Landschaft (mit Gerhard Richter)
Another Death Star
Abendland
Kunst-Wet
Alone In An Airport
Read a review
Read another review!
Browse all of the poems
Re:
2005
In mid-2005, just before I travelled to South Korea as an Asialink resident, Andy Jackson and I put together a little chapbook that we named Re: in honour of a series of emails we’d sent without a subject line. The chapbook was limited to fifty copies, all of which we have now distributed, I think. We even had a little reading to launch the book, with Paul Mitchell as MC. The format of the book was straightforward, with a total of four poems each, printed in alternating order. We chose not to attribute any of the poems, although I guess it’s probably pretty easy to tell who wrote which ones, as they’re fairly consistent in style. At the time I thought it might be a good idea to expand the concept and produce a further eleven books, each with a different collaborator. However, as you’ve probably already guessed, I gave up on that idea pretty quickly. In any case, it was a great experience to work with Andy, who is IMHO an awesome poet.
Track listing:
This Stubborn Spotlight
Oh God!
A Safe Distance
Maz
Another Suicide Girl
Summer Bay Dreaming
Everything Is Paid For
Station Static
Read “Maz” online at Luzmag
Read “Oh God!” online at PFS Post
du papa
Issue #1, 2002
In 2002, Melbourne poets Michael Farrell and Joe Hill set up a little publishing house called du papa and I was lucky enough to be included in their first (and so far, only) publication, a series of three chapbooks printed individually in A4 format and presented in a minimalist black and white folder. My 8 poems appeared together with Claire Gaskin’s 9 poems and Primoz Cucnik’s 4 poems. Collectors may be interested to note that the inside front cover of my chapbook incorrectly states that I was born in 1969. I still have a few copies of this one hidden away and will sell them on ebay once one of us becomes famous enough to make it worth my while.
Track listing:
The House That Cortez Built
5 Mobile Phone Text Messages
Desmond
I Don’t Like Cricket
Madchester
[ ]
Caroline
Departure(s)
The Happy Farang
2000
My first ever chapbook, composed of poems I wrote while travelling through Thailand and Laos in 1999. The title refers to an imaginary Western tourist (’farang’ in Thai) and his/her difficulties in dealing with being overseas for the first time. I had 200 copies of this little gem printed up by my friend Tim who had access to a colour photocopier - we used a nice navy blue ink and whipped them up one hot summer night without really knowing what we were doing or how to do it. I then spent the next year or so trying to dispose of all them, with a modicum of success - one even ended up in the Rare Books collection at SUNY Buffalo (don’t ask). I now only have three or four left, making them collector’s items. Should you be interested in buying one of these books, I’m asking only $1,000, 000 per copy. I’ve now uploaded all of the poems to this site and at some point I planned to re-publish the book, until I forgot about it, and tried to think of something better to do. Having failed in that effort, I decided to do nothing.
Track listing:
The Happy Farang
Monk-Lovers
Bangkok: City of Angles
Thomas Pynchon & the Art of Anonymity Maintenance
Cities On the Move
Tuk-Tuk
The Postman of Kowloon
Non-Touristic Trek
The Chao Le
Takraw Monkey
Oh Blossom
Mountains of Pai
Mr Tui
Emaciated Buddha
The Boys on Thanon Lim Khong
Low Season, Last Days
The Kip & How to Carry It
Under the Pavement, Laos
A Photographer’s Wet Dream
Cock & Football
Visit Laos Year
Tintin & the Plain of Jars
The Gums of Vientiane
Read the complete text of The Happy Farang
Read three poems from The Happy Farang in slope
As co-editor
Going Down Swinging
#24, 2006
Like most good things in life, my stint as co-editor of Going Down Swinging, Australia’s finest literary magazine, was all too brief. I came on board for just one issue but the experience was fantastic: we selected over a hundred and forty pages of poetry and prose, along with a bumper eighty page comics section, making this issue one of the biggest (and, of course, best). I was flattered to be asked to be MC for the launch of the issue in December 2006. Props to my co-editors Steve Grimwade, Lisa Greenaway and Mandy Ord.
Read my editorial for the issue
Southern Review
v38, no. 1 2005
Denise Meredyth and I, wearing our Swinburne hats, co-edited this special issue of Southern Review, a fully-refereed interdisciplinary journal of communication, politics and culture published by RMIT University, Melbourne. The theme of the issue was Online Archives and Virtual Collections and it also contains an article I wrote about my experiences as an editor of Cordite, entitled “That Wicked CIA Technology: Archiving An Online Literary Journal”.
Visit the Southern Review homepage (journal now called ‘Communication, Politics and Culture)
Click here for details of my article online
As publisher
OI: poewemz bii tom see
COD, 2004
In 2004, deciding that my life wasn’t nearly as busy as it could be, I set up an imprint for Cordite Press, known as COD, or Cordite On Demand. Its aims were pretty ambitious - basically a complete shake-up of the Australian publishing industry. While this is obviously still light years away and despite COD’s all-too-brief lifespan, we did manage to publish two books, the first of which was written by Melbourne-based poet and cricketer Tom Clark, under the pseudonym tom see. The book was designed with the dimensions of a vinly record single cover in mind, and the book was also notable for its great cover illustratin (bu Charles Lake) and its listing of the table of contents on the book’s reverse. We printed 250 copies of this book, and I’ve got about fifty left. As this was my first attempt at publishing a book, I obviously learnt a good many lessons the hard way. Nevertheless the process of publication was really fascinating and interesting for me - not least because we used the services of BPA, a Melbourne-based printer who offer digital printing, at a lower price than traditional offset printing. While I have my reservations about the pros and cons of POD as opposed to offset printing, this first book proved to me that it is possible to produce a good-looking book according to your own design specifications, and that it won’t necessarily cost the erath to get it printed.
covers: poems by nick whittock
COD, 2004
COD’s second book, by cricket tragic and librarian Nick Whittock, was also a lot of fun to make. Nick wanted the book to be shaped like the old Footrot Flats comics. Once we got this in our minds, everything else flowed naturally and what you get for your buck is a strange, experimental and brave collection of poems about cricket and cricketers, including poem-title-of-the-century nominee, “Doosra Locomotion”. However, as with Tom’s book, the publishing experience was also full of ‘learnings’. Anyone who has published a book or launched something similar (eg a CD, an art exhibition etc) would know of the dreaded-worst-nightmare-situation when the thing to be launched dsoes not show up on time. Unfortunately for Nick, this fate befell the first launch of his book, which was conducted sans product. This was more than made up for, however, by a launch in Nick’s home town of candelo in southern NSW, where we packed out the locasl cafe and had a great time.
To order copies of either of these books, at $15 plus postage and handling, email me at the Cordite address: cordite [AT] cordite {dot} org (dot) au.
Visit the COD archives at the Cordite site
