Basket

Your basket is empty.

Family Trees

128 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published April 2020
ISBN 9781925818406

Family Trees

Michael Farrell

The poems in Michael Farrell’s Family Trees operate according to a queer and inclusive logic, which binds humans, animals, objects, plants and concepts in familial relationships. The poems model contact through affection, sharing, and attention – sometimes violent attention. They tell strange stories – tall tales from the country, rambling reminiscences, shaggy-dog stories – which speak of shifting realities and weird and wonderful things, the coffin with legs that walked, an infertile rabbit that fosters a lamb, robots hunting in Kenya for the little white lion of Tokyo, an argumentative sock-puppet, marsupial geese and singing worms, and Pope Pinocchio, who thinks his heartbeat powers Italy. The characters in these scenarios are quite at home – they think, gossip, sleep and work. They construct ancestries and genealogies. A phrase, a detail, an object can act like a hinge, sending them in a hundred directions. Anything can be a twig (or bud or leaf or fruit) on Farrell’s family trees.

In the great tradition of queer Australian landscape poetics…Farrell recombines Australian ecology, history, and mythology into glorious, and very funky, new forms.Judith Wright Calanthe Award citation

Endless, rascally contortions. Read them boldly as an archaeologist…but stay quietly aware that the texts are already affecting your cognitive frame, turning you into their accomplice in the renewing of language.Gwee Li Sui, Sydney Review of Books

About the Author

Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell was born in Bombala, NSW in 1965, and has lived in Melbourne since 1990. Michael has a PhD in literary studies from the University of Melbourne and is a practising artist, as well as a poet. Awards include the 2018 Judith Calanthe Queensland Literary Award for I Love Poetry, and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize for ‘Beautiful Mother’. Michael has performed and published internationally, and has been given residencies in Italy, Slovenia, Japan and China, as well as giving guest lectures in China and Chile. 

Read more