Pop This Date in The Diary or on The Back of Your Hand or.... anywhoos it's December 17!

Come celebrate the launch/arrival/release of In Hand, my book of poetry. 7:30pm, December 17 @ The Fringe Gallery, 94 Bawdan st, Willagee.

To be launched by Dr Andrew Burke, with readings from ze book by the dapper & strange, Black Rider himself, Jeremy Balius and the sky snapping, word mistress of Recoil, Coral Carter and music by the wildly delicious Kissin' Cousins! Bring your dancing slippers... and a poem to share!

Some blurbs ..s.... s

Amanda Joy's In Hand is a sustained love letter, a farewell signature in a handwritten flourish. It is a celebration of the body, of loss and acceptance, family, water and landscape. These poems work their spells in language cast under pressure into a sublime, lyrical whole. ~Anthony Lawrence


The poetry of Amanda Joy stretches out to touch the reader both physically and spiritually. Her words penetrate to the heart and soul of relationships, opening to the naked eye not only those we have with lovers, friends and strangers, but that which we have with the natural world that surrounds us. Then deeper still, to the relationship between our own thoughts, needs and desires.
In Hand has a devotional quality. Each poem an experience, to be carried with us and contemplated throughout the day; each poem a flower of mystery, whose petals await their revelatory blossoming.
~Ray Sapienza, Moongaze Publishing, editor of Fragile Arts Press, author of Tumbled Streams


‘In Hand’, by Australian writer Amanda Joy, offers much in a diverse selection of poems. These are poems of love, desire, longing and language as experienced in these and other states. The common trope these days of the body as language is nevertheless used in many vivid and quite extraordinary poems.
Any reader who engages with Joy's poems will find many such subtle constructions, courage to confront the real, or the mysterious, and the general adventure of life and language. Knowledge and sometimes some ‘difficulty’ in this writing, thus enhances a life lived - but a life revealed in subtle ideas, and vivid images and sharp details, and as language, lived intensely. ~Richard Taylor, Conversations With a Stone


Amanda Joy's writing conveys perfect fragility as she tells of a world where beauty is temporary and to be held reverently for the moment it exists
~ Victoria Fotios, Sunday Morning Spiders

Tesselates (verb)

“fists have many forms” ~Margaret Atwood

She has become the hollow room
of this house with its black throat

Her hands are holding
a porcelain cup

I’ll use this truth later, but here,
this stealing is done with
fingers, even ones holding
keys of doors

still
this is a borrowing, I will
borrow your hands, I will
place them
on
my chest, I will
be the wanky fucker
who discerns

my own enjambment, I will
strip the face off
this poem

until
it bleeds gently
into this

patient tongue
of sea lapping smooth the rocks,
gulping down
the swimmers who can’t

Haiga @ The Fringe Gallery

Sunday 20th June

Cya here~



and if you're looking for some awesome poetry looksy here; Stylus Poetry Journal, Street/Life Issue edited by Graham Nunn


and I'll be posting some new poetry in here over the next week or so too.

Etymology

Fairy tales were
what I read before
sleep in her house
From a huge book, left
near the bed

The more people I tell
the more I seem to show

We visit Wave Rock and
Mulka’s Cave with its
handprints and story
of a cross-eyed birth
and devoured children

I want a word
for this place
in my stomach
behind where
tiny feet will press
beneath my ribs

some ganglia, twisted
spaghetti of nerves
apparently

You eat scones with
your parents, at the kiosk
Tiny waterholes, writhing
with baby frogs
pocket the rock

I scoop some out
Smell of dead ones
makes me retch,
alone, I get scared
walk back

Overlooked, the ants
Mulka was left to
once he was speared
to death

Words are words
We leave
with a tshirt






If you're anywhere near Brisbane --> Speedpoets

Staying

On her knees again
changing his dressings
My Grandmother’s
sunlit hands over
a wound that
never healed

Seven months and
still not showing

Why I’m here-
This growing inside me
drawing me toward
the women and their
understanding

They’re staying
home, watching
A Country Practice
leafing through old Bride
magazines
and its not cliché
it’s just what they do

I’m still going
out with the boys
in the utes, in my jeans
with their guns
and beer
It’s what they do

I think of the soft bones
The ones that aren’t
mine, hardening inside
my body, half-baked
bun in the oven

Your Mother is showing
me how to make cookies
for the men to take out
I want to be good
company

I want to know
about babies from women
who’ve had them

Which hidden parts
of us dilate, darken
or tear

Chambers

In my grandmother’s house
was a ginger cat, too fat
to walk, which no one admitted
ever feeding

Seven months and
still not showing

I have to shuffle my feet
through the soft lolling bodies
to bang on the roof, stop.
I can feel blood and fur
drying on my ankles as
I get out of the tray to piss

In the graded paddock
there’s nowhere to hide

I hear the returned focus as
behind me the torches catch
another set of eyes, sharp
cracks and ricochet fracture
the hard night

A cat, feral, screaming
now, sharpening
the air with pain
now and the boys
are laughing as I walk
back

Your face pale and
tight as the moon
I grab your gun

push past the boys elbowing
each other proudly and aim
at its head

As it slumps, the silence
releases us. You’re smiling
at your Dad, who’s jumping
around like a shot
rabbit- Jeez she can shoot
-My lad knocked up
a good one.

For what it means,
I grew up with guns