New South publishes previously unpublished literary and visual art promoting the work of emerging and established artists. New South holds no subject biases.
It is rare to find a book that is able to simultaneously capture our imaginative, creative selves and our cognitive, academic selves so suddenly. No Starling is such a text—we don’t know whether to turn the page and keep reading, or put down the book and make an attempt at writing.
Mind, body, and spirit slam together like teenagers in a mosh pit in Miguel Murphy's A Book Called Rats, which is a complex study on the different parts of the human being.
Of all the punctuation marks in the English language, there is none more suspect than the ellipsis. What, the reader wonders when stumbling upon those three dots, has the writer left out?
"I don't like poetry." Those four words are something I hear all too frequently from friends and relatives. But when Aunt Susie says she doesn't like poetry because it doesn't make sense, she's talking about the verses she read in school—Blake, Longfellow, Dickinson. She's talking about classics, full of mythic allusion and legends of the western world.
In her second collection, Astoria, Malena Morling presents us with a thinking book. She opens the first poem with the lines "If there is another world, / I think you can take a cab there"; and closes the last poem with "And we can never leave where we are".
New South publishes previously unpublished literary and visual art promoting the work of emerging and established artists. New South holds no subject biases.
16 February, 2008