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Nathan Shepherdson

parallel equators by Nathan Shepherdson & camping underground by Greg McLaren

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January-February 2024, no. 461
Anders Villani reviews two new poetry collections

'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 achieve clarity by integrating opacity – invites a question fundamental to poetics: how much resistance is too much, or not enough?

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States of Poetry 2016 QLD Podcast | 'the black hand of Badia Elmi' by Nathan Shepherdson

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States of Poetry Podcast - Series One

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Nathan Shepherdson reads his poem 'the black hand of Badia Elmi' which features in the 2016 Queensland anthology.

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'the notebooks of Mr & Mrs Emeritus' by Nathan Shepherdson | States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

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States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

ironing the crease into her lung with your breath
the six words in end steam over blue charcoal in her eye

your hands arrive in separate envelopes on different days
and they are addressed to each other

even the earth in its eyedropper is not medicine to our mouths
it's the milk dispensed through holes in a flute that keeps us alive

Mr & Mrs Emeritus ...

'the black hand of Badia Elmi' by Nathan Shepherdson | States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

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States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

the black hand of Badia Elmi corrected and cropped

Nathan Shepherdson

Recording