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Kent MacCarter

Fat chance. A million to one. Buckley’s. We’ve all come across bizarre tales of survival that defy belief. Take the case of sixty-year-old Hiromitsu Shinkawa, found floating ten miles out to sea, clinging to the roof of his house, days after a tsunami wiped out his home town in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan in 2011. What were the odds?

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Published in April 2024, no. 463

An interview with Kent MacCarter

Australian Book Review
Tuesday, 23 March 2021

In the waning days of the Italian lira, I accidentally left a new velvet jacket – pockets stuffed with an early mobile and gobs of cash – in a café in Florence, en route to pay school tuition. 1999. Gone. That forced me to return to Santa Fe, then to Chicago where a friend shoehorned me into a role at the University of Chicago Press. There I dabbled in poetry with Thom Gunn and Mark Strand, and in abstractions with Robert von Hallberg and Julia Kristeva. Initial glimmers. I headed to Melbourne to hopscotch my finance degrees with an English gong with Tony Birch and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. I worked for Thomson Learning and Curriculum Press and was treasurer of Small Press Network. In 2010, I became managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review. I started Cordite Books in 2015.

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Published in April 2021, no. 430

Kent MacCarter is Poet of the Month

Australian Book Review
Thursday, 25 February 2016

I have a host/parasite relationship to my poems, fussing over inspiration until, oftentimes, it decomposes into ruins: host poems. From that non-process, new poems, unique, sprout from the loam, subsuming what 'nutrients' exist and become my better poems. They arrive, and within ten drafts I'm happy.

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Published in March 2016, no. 379

Dust without dimension

The November 13 attacks on ordinary citizens in Paris have outraged and galvanised the world community. We share this sense of revulsion. Australia has a large French population and a rich tradition of Francophilia. Our sympathies go to our French readers and to the families of all the victims.

Words, at such times, are de trop. Not La Marseillaise

Published in December 2015, no. 377

Poem of the Week - 'Are You Ready to Go Superfast?' by Kent MacCarter

Australian Book Review
Thursday, 22 October 2015

In ABR's inaugural 'Poem of the Week' Kent MacCarter introduces and reads his poem 'Are You Ready to Go Superfast?'.

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Published in Poem of the Week

'Are You Ready to Go Superfast?' a new poem by Kent MacCarter

Kent MacCarter
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
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Kent MacCarter’s third collection of poems comprises a patchwork of forms and phenomena, in parts influenced by and dedicated to poets of the New York School and the ‘Generation of 1968’. MacCarter’s own cosmopolitan greetings share the offbeat tones and imagery of precursors, including Frank O’Hara and John Forbes. Touches of the former’s dry humour permeate Sputnik’s Cousin, alongside edgier local presences apparent in the poetry.

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