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Anders Villani

Anders Villani

Anders Villani is the author of Aril Wire (Five Islands Press, 2018) and Totality (Recent Work Press, 2022)

Anders Villani reviews 'Judas Boys' by Joel Deane

November 2023, no. 459 27 October 2023
Early in Joel Deane’s third novel, the point of view shifts from the first to the third person as the narrator, Patrick ‘Pin’ Pinnock, reflects on a moment in boyhood, standing atop a diving board at night: He looks down and sees the white frame of the rectangular pool, but everything inside the white frame is black. The darkness within the frame is his past and future, he thinks, and the ... (read more)

Anders Villani reviews two new poetry collections

January-February 2024, no. 461 24 September 2023
‘Poems reawaken in us,’ writes James Longenbach, ‘the pleasure of the unintelligibility of the world.’ They do so via ‘mechanisms of self-resistance’: disjunctive strategies that work, for Longenbach, to ‘resist our intelligence almost successfully’. What ‘almost’ means here is, of course, a matter of taste – and style. Nonetheless, this Romantic mandate – that poems achiev ... (read more)

Anders Villani reviews 'You Made Me This Way' by Shannon Molloy

April 2023, no. 452 27 March 2023
Shannon Molloy’s 2020 memoir, Fourteen, recounted a childhood and adolescence of grisly homophobic violence. Yet many readers of that book – a bestseller, adapted for the stage and optioned for a film production – may find You Made Me This Way noteworthy in part because it reveals what Fourteen left out: the sexual abuse Molloy suffered, beginning at age five, at the hands of an older boy. T ... (read more)

Anders Villani reviews 'Mirabilia: New poems' by Lisa Gorton

October 2022, no. 447 27 September 2022
Mirabilia is the plural form of the Latin mirabile: wonderful thing, marvel. Since the publication of her first book, Press Release, in 2007, Lisa Gorton has cultivated such a voice in Australian poetry. Mordant political wit, formal and thematic bricolage, a liquid control of the line, and the ability to trace patterns across the strata of history and society – to rove between time and the time ... (read more)

Anders Villani reviews 'Pyre' by Maureen Alsop

August 2022, no. 445 28 July 2022
‘Every sacred language,’ writes Octavio Paz, ‘is secret. And conversely: every secret language … borders on the sacred.’ In the liminal Pyre, poet Maureen Alsop traverses – and erodes – this secret/sacred border, which is also the border of life and death, ‘the valley between our language’ (‘North Channel’). Each of the book’s section titles is a variation on ‘Selenomancy ... (read more)

Anders Villani reviews 'Running time' by Emily Stewart and 'Inheritance' by Nellie Le Beau

June 2022, no. 443 25 May 2022
The lyric subject, literature’s most intimate ‘I’, has vexed critics for centuries. Is it the poet? Is it a fiction, a device? Or is the relation between author and speaker, as Jonathan Culler suggests, ‘indeterminate’, such that ‘any model … that attempts to fix or prescribe that relationship will be inadequate’? Two new award-winning Australian poetry collections offer fine-grain ... (read more)

'Deer Knife', a poem by Anders Villani

April 2022, no. 441 23 March 2022
When life hides behind the mulch     of what lives, can they expect more                    than this refusal to hold each other in the open? Lemongrass floss between molars,     you wish for foxes. You tell me you don’t wish for them    &nbs ... (read more)

Anders Villani reviews 'How to Make a Basket' by Jazz Money, 'Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Carepack' by Ann Vickery, and 'The Open' by Lucy Van

November 2021, no. 437 25 October 2021
Good poetry uncovers the secret in the manifest, and the manifest in the secret. Three new collections throw this paradox into vibrant, unsettling relief. Each book deserves a broad readership. Each beats back the lethargic thinking that has invaded society under the cover of the pandemic. How to Make A Basket by Jazz Money University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 136 pp Two poems in Jazz Mone ... (read more)

Anders Villani reviews 'Prose Poetry: An introduction' by Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton

May 2021, no. 431 26 April 2021
It speaks volumes that almost a century and a half after Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen announced the modern prose poem, James Longenbach influentially defined poetry as ‘the sound of language organized in lines’. An otherness, bordering on illegitimacy, pervades what Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington argue is ‘the most important new poetic form to emerge in English-language poetry since ... (read more)
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