A Lyrebird, Selected Poems of Michael Farrell by Michael Farrell; Editor Jared Schickling

Revelation and habit conspire in this selection of Michael Farrell’s poetry, whose shambling virtuosity brings to mind the lost art of scat singing. From his earliest poems, Farrell’s skittish lines echo the studied laissez-faire of the New York School, but they also make it new, with a startling range of tone and diction broadcast—and exquisitely garbled—from somewhere down under. Yet perhaps the most astonishing quality of Farrell’s poetry is the way it summons that rarest of affinities—a correspondence with the movement of dance. For reading Farrell’s poems can feel like one is shadowing a step, a combination, by Gene Kelly—or Savion Glover, looping and breaking across a field of trifles and sorrows.

—Daniel Tiffany

Enter A Lyrebird and you open onto a polyphony of slang and nuance. Expect a humorous disorientation and deep travel through undersides of all that can be said and borrowed. Just in time, since mono-culture cannot know itself, Michael Farrell’s deft bravery transmutes English and gives us journeys out.

—Sarah Riggs

Michael Farrell grew up in Bombala, New South Wales. He lives in Melbourne. He has edited features for US journals Slope, GutCult and ecopoetics. He visited the US in 2004, 2015 and 2016, and has performed in Buffalo, Seattle, Berkeley, and San Francisco. Books unrepresented in this selection are BREAK ME OUCH (a comics poetry book, 3 Deep), and Long Dull Poem (SOd). His scholarly book, revised from his PhD, is Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan). Michael also edited, with Jill Jones, Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann, 2009), and edits the magazine Flash Cove (flashcovemag@gmail.com), with designer Wendy Cooper. He writes songs with Jimmy Hawk, and co-wrote the Dick Diver single “Waste the Alphabet.”

His poems have been included in the Turnrow Anthology of Australian Poetry (Turnrow) and Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba/Giramondo), as well as the following North American journals, some now defunct: Boston Review; Denver Quarterly; Verse; Pool; Lana Turner; can we have our ball back; Moria; Poetry; Shampoo; smalltown; Coconut; ex-ex-lit; Mirage#4/Period(ical); Yellow Field; blue and yellow dog; La Petite Zine; eccolinguistics; LIT; The Literary Review; Quarterly West; Slope; Tooth; Volt; Aught; Boog City; Dispatch Detroit; ducky; Fence; GutCult; Poethia; petticoat relaxer; sendecki.com; sidereality and others; thanks to their editors.

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Jared Schickling is the author of several BlazeVOX books, including the trilogy Two Books on the Gas: Above the Shale and Achieved by Kissing + ATBOALGFPOPASASBIFL: Irritations, Excrement and Wipes + The Pink (2015-13) and Province of Numb Errs (2016), as well as The Paranoid Reader: Essays, 2006-2012 (Furniture Press, 2014) and the chapbook Prospectus for a Stage (LRL Textile Series, 2013). He lives in Western New York and edits Delete Press and The Mute Canary, publishers of poetry.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 162 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-280-8