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Googlecholia

96 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published October 2022
ISBN 9781922725318

Googlecholia

Michael Farrell

The new poetry collection by Michael Farrell, winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

The Judith Wright Calanthe Award is Australia’s most prestigious poetry prize. Its award to Michael Farrell marks him out as one of our most important poets. There is no one like him for his souped-up surrealism, the range of his images, his wit and playfulness, his satirical takes on contemporary life.

The title of his new collection Googlecholia alludes to the range of emotional affects and feelings that the Internet induces: pleasure, satisfaction, joy, melancholy, anxiety, schadenfreude, boredom, nausea. As a many-armed search engine, Google represents both the boundless realms of the Internet, and the reductive image of knowledge that we hold in our heads. Google presides (alongside Wikipedia) for Farrell, because of the ease of research it enables for poems: whether for a quote, an etymology, or a fact. Here its elements populate and drive the poetic imagination, creating realities in which anything might be related to something else, and the strange, the unsettling and the fantastic are the natural order of things.

The poems in Googlecholia include ‘French Open’, a portrait of John McEnroe in the midst of a Baudelairean-inflected match; Philip Emu, a rewrite of John Skelton’s Tudor-era ‘Philip Sparrow’; the ABBA-driven prose poem ‘Grammatical Theme and “Dancing Queen”’; ‘“Fire” At The Pointer Sisters Factory’, a David Ireland-style nickname extravaganza (and a Best of Australian Poems 2021 choice); ‘“Cars” Is Feeling Grateful’, a status update via Gary Numan’s 1979 hit of the same name; and ‘Arthur Boyd Has Pink Teeth’, inspired by an early painting of his.

LONGLISTED: ALS Gold Medal 2023
SHORTLISTED: Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection 2023

Michael Farrell’s generous, versatile imagination transforms Internet Tech’s info-melancholy into a fantastic jumble of references from local and global pop culture, high and low literature. Its playful affects collapse received ideas, flipping cliché into drollery. Alongside the pleasures of glossolalia, and the artistry of poetic technique, Googlecholia offers a cool thoughtfulness.
Judges’ comments, Judith Wright Calanthe Award

Farrell’s poems are about crashing into yourself and your own tastes again and again…they cut close in on uncomfortable, tender feelings before skipping artfully away.
Isabella Gullifer-Lauriecitation

 

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. 

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Reviews

Awards

LONGLISTED: ALS Gold Medal 2023 SHORTLISTED: Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection 2023

Related News

Michael Farrell: a note on Googlecholia

‘While experimentalism, as a framework, can defuse the impact of specific experiments, for myself, in this case, it keeps the writing alive to poetry’s possibilities: not just in terms of form (in its various aspects), but in terms of what can be said, and the range of voice deployed: the positions and positioning of voice.’

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