Archival CV - Richard James Allen
BOOKS: FICTION, POETRY AND PERFORMANCE TEXTS
2006 THE KAMIKAZE MIND (www.thekamikazemind.com)
by Richard James Allen
Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath. (Click to order)
“A poetic take on what wisdom the universe might spit out after a black hole has gobbled an astronaut.”
Bernard Lane, The Australian
“Funny, ribald, insightful, memorable...ridiculous...the charm of studied absurdity.”
Michael McGirr, The Sydney Morning Herald
"A dazzling reflection of a creative mind bristling with ideas."
Su McInerney, U: UTS News
"The book is imaginative and very surprising...As an examination of identity, it is poetic, saucy, and comic, with gems of wisdom that seem to appear 'out of the blue'....These definitions are moving, beautiful and shocking."
Chrissie Parrott, dancewest magazine
"Probably the most quirky current poetry book is Richard James Allen's The Kamikaze Mind (Brandl & Schlesinger), which starts from the premise that an astronaut has entered a black hole and been reduced to radiation particles. Allen's ingenous text is therefore the 'recovered fragments of his mind...organised alphabetically.' The result is an accessible and surprising work that has a cumulative effect on the reader."
Andrew Wilkins, Bookseller + Publisher
"An astonishing and rich work, pithy and witty, tender and often wise, sad and raunchy, imaginative and very surprising...I found myself constantly wishing to note down quotable quotes...eloquent and moving."
Thomas W. Shapcott
“The Kamikaze Mind is a unique compilation of poetic formations and ruminations permitting the reader to either wade in the shallows of a few pages or dive into the depths of reading systematically from one alphabetical marker to the next. It may amuse, bemuse, shock, confront, disturb, or caress the senses as one slides through each entry. As in free fall, there is exhilaration and anxiety to be experienced in the same moment. Allen has created a bold, choreographic project of juxtaposing a myriad of embodied and linguistic encounters over and, often, against each other. The persistent reader will find great reward in joining in the ‘dance’ between and across its pages.”
Dr Mark Seton, Jacket, February, 2007
"Poet, choreographer and filmmaker Richard James Allen's new book, The Kamikaze Mind, is an alphabet of lateral definitions, home-made and re-vamped aphorisms, mini-poems, and micro-narrative fragments that add up to what the writer calls "a dictionary of a floating mind." Whether encountered on a sustained reading or casually dipped into, the entries are fleeting glimpses of the mind of an astronaut who has "launched himself into a black hole"where everything is in flux, everything relative, where truths crash into their opposites and, if you're lucky, something transcendent flies out of their fusion."
Keith Gallasch, RealTime
"Through an accumulation of broken meanings and definitions, moments of insight, panic, wisdom and longing, Richard Allen's Kamikaze Mind is a fierce and luminous examination of identity in a floating and disintegrated world. Sharp, fun, yet also intensely open and exposed, Allen constructs an astonishing lexicon which enables the reader to re-think and question the notion of a delimiting self. This innovative and resourceful web of interpretations, reminds us that we are all part of a greater field of interlocking processes, but, hold onto your Chambers, readers! - because this wordbook of the mind can also be as freakish, whimsical and as inconceivable as a gaggle of quarks. Yet it's also an edgy read, complex and sometimes sad - and open both to pleasure and surrender. A truly innovative and original book."
Judith Beveridge
“The Kamikaze Mind is a new form of novel, a deranged form of dictionary, a poem for the open minded, the hyper textual and the restless unconventional thinker. It is genuinely experimental and yet a highly accessible and witty work … a text truly for the 21st century.”
Gleebooks Gleaner
"Silly Season Gift Idea: This year why not treat your mate or your fam to an intriguing book that I personally recommend - The Kamikaze Mind. It's not one of those cover-to-cover reads so it's perfect for the magazine or newspaper buff as well as the bookworm. It's thought provoking and stopping at the same time - the perfect Christmas gift. It's one of those books you keep coming back to, and when you do, you have a hard time putting it down. Author Richard James Allen tells the broken story of a mind, lost and found."
Rebecca Mar Young, Gum Tree Chinese Medicine Newsletter
“A fascinating Christmas gift which fits snuggly in Xmas stockings, beach bags, and back-to-work bags. A perfect blend of irony, thoughtfulness and humour to wake up to after the partying stops, to accompany you to the beach, and to carry as a secret weapon to keep a smile on your face and a bit of perspective when it’s time to go back to work.” Christina Brown, Life Source Yoga and Health Newsletter
1999 THURSDAY’S FICTIONS (Read at Australian Poetry Library)
by Richard James Allen (webpage)
Five Islands Press, Wollongong.
“[Thursday’s Fictions’] big moral/metaphysical ‘week’ is a true achievement...what I admire is the stamina, the clarity of soul, the willingness to ask hard questions. This is the kind of poetry Alec Hope was (or should have been) looking for when he lamented the decline of the ‘discursive mode’. It’s utterly different, I’m glad to say, from all those little OZ poems about a sensitive bloke walking out one morning and seeing the light shimmer on farmyard dams.”
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, University of Melbourne
“What is most immediately remarkable about the book is its stylistic range: Allen employs a variety of formal models, including stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, dramatic dialogue, as well as free verse and prose-poetry, with equal assurance and sophistication.”
John Hawke, University of Wollongong
“[The Way Out At Last Cycle] could become the greatest symbolist poem in Australian literature.”
David Gilbey, Charles Sturt University
Shortlisted for the 2000 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Poetry,
the Kenneth Slessor Prize:
"In Thursday’s Fictions Allen is both playful and satirical, defiant and seductive, as he experiments with the possibilities of poetry as performance, utterance and text. The book combines highly contemporary inflexions of language with ancient and classical modes of writing, creating an extended dialogue of self and soul."
The Judges for Poetry, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
1999 PERFORMING THE UNNAMEABLE:
AN ANTHOLOGY OF AUSTRALIAN PERFORMANCE TEXTS (webpage)
Edited by Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman
Currency Press and RealTime, Sydney. (Click to Order)
“This is a remarkable achievement showing how performance can be a platform for new ways of writing and an area of literary invention and achievement. Challenging, rewarding, confronting but essential reading. Make sure you buy and read Performing the Unnameable.”
Bill Simon, Metaphor
“RealTime 28 celebrates a major event in arts publishing: the first collection of Australian performance texts…Performing the Unnameable pays homage to some 2 decades of significant and innovative engagements between performers and the idea of theatre that have yielded an open-ended form often simply called performance. These works radically juxtapose a range of media, they evolve collaboratively, incorporate audiences into performances and…test the limits of the word…a rich repository of the ways that performance texts work”
Keith Gallasch, Editorial, RealTime
“A first in Australian publishing history and a priceless resource.”
Edward Scheer, Heat
1996 NEW LIFE ON THE 2ND FLOOR
By Karen Pearlman and Richard James Allen
A Tasdance publication, Launceston.
"The poems were powerful…Unlike anything I have read before which pertains to dance...powerful...a treasure."
Lisa Catherine Ehrich, Social Alternatives
1995 THE AIR DOLPHIN BRIGADE (Read at Australian Poetry Library)
By Richard James Allen
Paper Bark Press, Brooklyn, and Shoestring Press, Nottingham,
in association with Tasdance, Launceston.
“Confrontational, concretely philosophical, a blend of the spiritual, the physical and hardnosed contemporaneity, [the poems] push against concepts of mortality and eternity, against life and art bogged down in time and the constrictions of ignorance...Allen’s voice demands to be heard through its lucidity, its passion and the concepts which ‘spring fully-stripped/from the head like tigers’." Lynette Kirby, Australian Book Review
“Allen’s poetry challenges, leaps from one idea to another, plunges from air to earth, air to water in a heady mix of metaphor and image.”
Sally Clarke, Brolga
1995 WHAT TO NAME YOUR BABY (Read at Australian Poetry Library)
By Richard James Allen
Paper Bark Press, Brooklyn, in association with Tasdance, Launceston.
"Allen's poetry leaps from one mountain peak of ideas to another."
Jeremy Eccles, The Sydney Review
1993 HOPE FOR A MAN NAMED JIMMIE & GRAND ILLUSION JOE
By Richard James Allen
Five Islands Press, Wollongong. (Read at Australian Poetry Library)
“Richard Allen’s poetry does what I am always hoping John Ashbery’s will do but never does: gives you enough clear meaning to hang on to to prevent you becoming scared or bored. If Ashbery is ‘seamless nonsense’ ...then Allen is seamy sense...a readable mosaic containing beauty, wisdom and humour...an admirable feat.” Dennis Nicholson, Mattoid
“Some books make me want to weep. Others make me want to sing. Hope for a man named Jimmie and Grand Illusion Joe made me want to tap dance on the top of trees....not for anyone suffering from vertigo or poets who cling to rails of traditional verse.”
Kathy Kituai, Muse
“I recommend this book for its intelligence, adventure and sense of play. It is gratifying to find work that is unafraid to stir the pot.”
Mark Reid, FAR
1989 TO THE OCEAN & SCHEHERAZADE (Read at Australian Poetry Library)
By Richard James Allen
Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.
“A fecund and fluent metafictive bricolage.”
Southerly
“An urban romantic with the ability to mine ‘the runaway horse of memory’ for images.”
Penelope Nelson, The Weekend Australian
“Surreal, allusive, dramatic, full of energy...A damn good poet.”
Ron Pretty, Scarp
1986 THE WAY OUT AT LAST & OTHER POEMS
By Richard James Allen
Hale & Iremonger, Sydney. (Read at Australian Poetry Library)
"Witty...urban poetry, immediate and demanding."
Rosemary O'Grady, Adelaide Advertiser
"Richard Allen is at once both contemporary and accessible. He is darkly honest in his reactions to the conditions of the present world and his feelings about it, yet he remains unwilling to let go of his search to construct meaning from it."
Nancy Jack Todd, Annals of Earth |
