Poems in Otoliths

Three of my poems have been published in Otoliths: a magazine of many e-things! The poems, “small town fsu”, “exhale on main street” and “alles klaar?” were written while travelling in the USA and Germany in 2002, and are part of a collection called Between Empires that might, eventually, see the light of day.

Otoliths is a really great e-mag, not least because of the fact that editor Mark Young has manipulated traditional Blogger templates to create a journal, as opposed to a diary. It’s good to see people making use of these for want of a better word “cookie-cutter” applications, especially in a literary sense. Visit the index page to see what I mean.

Incidentally, “FSU” in the poem refers to “fucking shit up”, although as Mark pointed out to me, it can also mean “fucking screw up” or “fucking stuff up”. It made me think about some other acronyms that should become the subject of poems – in particular, FUBAR and the old standby, SNAFU. Far more entertaining than ROTFL, IMHO.

OATE, my chapbook Abendland (reviewed here by Adam Fieled) has scored another review, this time from Australian poet Derek Motion on his cool poetry blog. Derek has some very generous things to say about the book, for which I am very grateful. I’m pretty sure Stung would be left seething too. As Derek mentions, there’s only one or two copies of Abendland left, so if you’d like one, leave me a comment or something like that. Also, for music fans, Derek’s just written a poetic review of the Big Day Out in Sydney [no longer online, unfortunately].