{"title":"Michael Farrell","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMichael Farrell\u003c\/strong\u003e crafts imaginative narratives that weave together elements of \u003cem\u003efamily, identity\u003c\/em\u003e, and the interplay of everyday life with broader cultural themes. His work often explores the subtle complexities of human relationships, set against vivid backdrops that invite readers to reflect on personal and communal histories.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eReaders can expect a blend of literary fiction and thoughtful cultural commentary, where inventive language and poignant storytelling come to the fore. Farrell’s books traverse the realms of \u003cem\u003earts and culture\u003c\/em\u003e, offering a rich tapestry of insight and emotion that resonates beyond the page.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"the-victoria-principle-by-michael-farrell-9781923106307","title":"The Victoria Principle","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Victoria Principle\u003c\/i\u003e, Michael Farrell extends the humour and narrative drive demonstrated in recent collections such as \u003ci\u003eI Love Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eGooglecholia\u003c\/i\u003e to the short story.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe collection begins with a writer character trying to do literary justice to the fear of birds; other stories feature creative activity, such as the conceptual artist who deliberately boils an egg to Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', or the would-be writers who attend a nude retreat in Nova Scotia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is pathos, too, in a storyteller's relationship with his sister, and in that of a gay doctor with a straight Italian waiter, who is trying to make ends meet while supporting two children with two different women.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe stories also revisit classical and popular myths, such as the judgement of Paris, and the life of Andy Gibb. The associations brought into play can be unexpected or absurd, but the process has its own logic: we may think of these fictions as meta-fictions, as 'thought stories' rather than short stories, offering inflections and reflections on queer Catholicism and mental breakdown, amidst the ongoing contradictions and ironies of contemporary Australian life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46846688624876,"sku":"9781923106307","price":34.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/19474193482872.jpg?v=1758918070"},{"product_id":"googlecholia-by-michael-farrell-9781922725318","title":"Googlecholia","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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, and his satirical takes on contemporary life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe title of his new collection, \u003ci\u003eGooglecholia\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems in \u003ci\u003eGooglecholia\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eBest of Australian Poems 2021\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'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\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'One of our most naturally protean writers, a quality perhaps more apt in this land than any other, given the simultaneity of white Federation with the rise of global mass media and the teeming biodiversity that evolved here well before all that' -\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSydney Morning Herald\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47078721749228,"sku":"9781922725318","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/15664303482872.jpg?v=1765218805"},{"product_id":"family-trees-by-michael-farrell-9781925818406","title":"Family Trees","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eFamily Trees\u003c\/i\u003e, Michael Farrell continues to question how humans relate to each other, and to the nonhuman world of animals, plants, and objects. Inheritance can be a heavy legacy, but in Farrell's expansive rendering, it frees itself: how do we connect? Through affection, and through sharing, swapping, and listening.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eFamily Trees\u003c\/i\u003e sees the return of familiar characters such as Pope Pinocchio, alongside new figures like Lord Marmalade, Cherry the 'Kiama Scammer', and Adam, a paranoid country English teacher. Presented in film-like scenarios, Farrell's characters are often busily thinking, while also participating in more mundane forms of activity such as gossip, sleep, and work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe book includes a number of South Coast poems that take a poking interest in how language blooms off-track. It's about memory, fantasy, and the possibilities of living in conceptual space. Anything that has roots can be a family tree.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e'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.' - \u003ci\u003eSydney Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47340785893612,"sku":"9781925818406","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/18509393482873.jpg?v=1772168916"},{"product_id":"open-sesame-by-michael-farrell-9781920882846","title":"Open Sesame","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMichael Farrell is well known for his ability to break language and action into their component gestures, freeing the emotion locked up in them, and very often their comic or magical aspects too, as the title of his new poetry collection suggests. \u003cem\u003eOpen Sesame\u003c\/em\u003e includes sonnets derived from the TV drama \u003cem\u003eThe Bill\u003c\/em\u003e, a sestina featuring JFK set in a laundrette, an improvised parody which cuts up writing found on supermarket shelves, collage poems including one on Phar Lap, four long poems on the theme of friendship, and ‘luke and henrys storyline,’ the story of a commitment ceremony between two gay men.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn an earlier form, the manuscript of this collection won the inaugural Barrett Reid Poetry Prize for experimental poetry, and was praised by the judges for its playfulness, craft and \"subliminal force.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47383957242092,"sku":"9781920882846","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/25325373482871.jpg?v=1773390446"},{"product_id":"i-love-poetry-by-michael-farrell-9781925336559","title":"I Love Poetry","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMichael Farrell is the most adventurous and experimental of contemporary Australian poets, continually pushing the boundaries of what poetry can do. Highly regarded for the playful rhythms and comic, gestural qualities of his poetry, his poems set language, syntax, and punctuation in motion. His eye for metaphor and the unexpected combination, for punning and the letter in both its verbal and visual aspects, gives his poetry its unique humour and energy. In poems like 'AC\/DC As First Emu Prime Minister', 'Sheep, Golden Syrup, Elizabeth Bishop', and 'Cate Blanchett And The Difficult Poem', \u003ci\u003eI Love Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e scrambles a landscape of colloquial and obscure images.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMichael Farrell's collections include \u003ci\u003eliving at the z\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eode ode\u003c\/i\u003e (shortlisted for the \u003ci\u003eAge\u003c\/i\u003e Poetry Book of the Year Award), \u003ci\u003eBREAK ME OUCH\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ea raiders guide\u003c\/i\u003e (published by Giramondo in 2008), \u003ci\u003ethempark\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003ethou sand\u003c\/i\u003e. His second collection with Giramondo, \u003ci\u003eOpen Sesame\u003c\/i\u003e (2011) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Award for Poetry. \u003ci\u003eCocky's Joy\u003c\/i\u003e (Giramondo 2015) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. He was the winner of the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. He is the author of a work of literary criticism, \u003ci\u003eWriting Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945\u003c\/i\u003e (Palgrave Macmillan).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47647699468524,"sku":"9781925336559","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/7cb0cd4faedfb1949c0f5599001df79d.jpg?v=1779235224"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/michael-farrell.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}