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On ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’ by Jackson Mac Low

In ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’, the space of the page becomes receptive, vibrant, like a ‘sticky decomposition web’ perhaps, where words, images, sounds lodge.

Sticky decomposition web riparian cacti’s vulnerable pollen / nothing-disconnécted crowned with magenta really swimming in meaning

Photographs / The past / a drink, a coolness / we thirst for. / The past / a drink, a poison / we thirst for.

It takes him a while to find the words, but this delay doesn’t seem to suggest any discomfort with the message, but rather an uncertainty about the use of language itself. Waiting for him to speak, Nat is intrigued, albeit slightly indifferent, as if what he was about to say – or propose, since it’s obviously a proposal – didn’t concern her.

Today I watered the front garden by hand. Maybe not the most efficient method but efficiency has its limits. I decided to pick three long stalks of feverfew daisies growing near the nectarine tree as they had started to lie down. They have an intense and complex scent half-mint half-chrysanthemum. It is an insect-repelling herb.

With so many characters and storylines and 1,085 pages that put Gravity’s Rainbow (a mere 760 pages) to shame, where to begin? Why, with the mathematicians, of course...

What John Donne Would Say / Nowhere to purchase and nothing to defend, / nothing but malls as thin as morning dew / unrolling each morning each roller door anew / and burned by the glory of Commerce without End.

Through photography and prose, Conrad Del Villar traces the significance of the tattoo in the Northern Philippines.

peerage / his body a paradigm / of tattoo husbandry he / glowers on the street dreaming / himself to be an award / winning website hawks

Boxing is indivisible from the marketing machinery which surrounds it, just as the art world, the literary world or the world of pop music contain within themselves both the nobility of the enterprise and the crassness of its exploitation. Indeed their nobility is framed within and defined by the structure of reward and recognition bestowed by their respective milieus.

Yellow is my favourite colour. If red is fire and passion, and blue is calm water, yellow is a flower. Yellow is very few things? Famously: sunflowers, cheese, taxis, bees, rubber ducks. The child’s sun is yellow. As is what I used to call, as a child, ‘normal yellow butter’ (margarine). ‘Yellow’ is fun to […]

She said to him, When a woman informs you that she’s a little drunk / this is actually a warning that she’s liable to collapse at any moment. / And when she tells you of a lost happiness / she means that you’re responsible for giving it back to her / on a silver platter, like those knights in the stories of Caliphs / who return home with the heads of enemies on their spears.

On that day in Canberra we had been together thirteen months. Steady, happy months. We owned Ikea furniture together, had combined our books, were joint owners of a Turkish kilim, a record player, and a vibrator. Maybe we would start gardening. Maybe we would get a dog. Maybe we would have a baby, a girl, with curly, black hair.

If you’ve ever gone wandering through the nooks and crannies of a large city, loitering with intent and with all the time in the world, attending to unlikely beauties and the aspects of the marvellous that are hidden in full sight right there in the ordinary – then please read on.

My impression of Murray’s critical reception is that it is partly based on laziness: critics don’t want to deal with him. They don’t want to argue, don’t want the bad light the poems put them in as adversaries: politically correct (how unsexy) and less mobile verbally than the poet himself.

Would you knowingly invite a reticent person to dinner, someone like my Oxford supervisor, or my friend who believed in sealing her lips? If you had no choice, how would you deal with such people? Sit them next to Chatty Carl or Commandeering Cathy in hope that their quiet attentiveness would mop up the attention-seeking of the other. The voluble need vessels, after all, into which to pour their words.

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On ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’ by Jackson Mac Low

Sticky Bread Gets Sliced{Forties 108}

Two Poems

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