Fiona Hile

Fiona Hile reviews 'Letter to Pessoa & Other Short Fictions' by Michelle Cahill

December 2016, no. 387 • 29 November 2016

You can tell a lot about a piece of writing from how it begins. For American poet Billy Collins, ‘the first line is the DNA of the poem’. With novels, as J.M. Coetzee writes, in Elizabeth Costello, ‘the problem of the opening ... is a simple bridging problem ... People solve such problems every day ... and having solved them push on.’ Coetzee’s high-wire opening barely hints at the philo ... (read more)

Fiona Hile reviews 'Good Night and Good Riddance' by David Cavanagh

March 2016, no. 379 • 25 February 2016

When Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers he claimed to have meant it as a compliment. Its grand resources were not constituted by extensive territories, natural resources, or a burgeoning population, but in the accumulation and dissemination of wares. In Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (2008), John Plotz remarks that certain objects 'come to seem dually endowed: they a ... (read more)

Fiona Hile reviews 'Rhinestone' by Ella O'Keefe, 'Metadata' by Amelia Dale, 'end motion/manifest' by Sian Vate, and 'Office of Locutions' by Kate Middleton

November 2015, no. 376 • 29 October 2015

All writers need good bookshelves, but the poet, perhaps more than any other writer, is charged with the involuntary dispensation and relentless accumulation of reading material. This is partly due to the proclivities of the producers and partly due to the characteristics of the form itself. As the notable cultural critic Pierre Bourdieu remarked, poetry's effects derive from games of suspense and ... (read more)

Augie March

ABR Arts • 21 April 2015

Augie March’s Melbourne Recital Centre (MRC) show is a home-town Gatorade-and-oranges stop on their ‘lap of luxury’, a national tour that has taken in velvet-lined theatres in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, and, as singer–songwriter Glenn Richards wryly put it during their set, Bendigo. The MRC was purportedly designed to resemble a piece of polystyrene packaging, the idea being that the epheme ... (read more)

'Plagiarism Dreams', a new poem by Fiona Hile

February 2014, no. 358 • 19 January 2014

We met at the end of the party when all the lights were fouled with drink and even the self-titled Ouzo Animal was yawning in protest at the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunken. I sipped soda water from a cracked glass, refrained from removing my jumper while a twelve-year old Bob Dylan with a voice like Hank Williams stood silently in the corner stirring vinyl motes with his ... (read more)