Marion May Campbell – languish launched…

Amid early twenty-first century crises I think of Campbell’s texts, creative and critical, as lifeboats, hovercraft with air-borne capacity, passenger-full and powering-up for a new creative departure.
—Moya Costello, TEXT

This new collection of poems by Marion May Campbell furthers her lifelong interest in form, stretching to breaking point the potential of poetic language. She stages language as trickster, traitor and seducer, flamboyantly connecting and wiring the circuitry of desire, just as it silences and slices. One moment, it stutters, teetering on the brink, and the next it transfigures loss in radiant dreamscapes, restoring ardour amongst the ruins of allegory. languish is Campbell’s eleventh book across the forms of fiction, poetry and critical theory. Her writing is always charged by a poetics of feminist contestation.

The book is available at: https://upswellpublishing.com/product/languish

Marion’s bio (from Upswell):

From early childhood, Marion wanted to be a painter, but working with language, with its etymological boundlessness, its sonic texture, its rhythmic and imagistic transport, became an equally enthralling thing to do. Through her novels, Lines of Flight (1985), Not Being Miriam (1988), Prowler (1999), Shadow Thief (2006) and konkretion (2013); her works for theatre Dr Memory in the Dream Home (1990), Ariadne’s Understudies (1992) and The Half-Life of Creonite (2010); the poetry collections Fragments from a Paper Witch (2010), third body (2018); the critical monograph Poetic Revolutionaries: Intertextuality and Subversion (2013), the memoir The Man on the Mantelpiece (2018) and a range of other nonfiction publications, what’s driven her work is the compulsion to yield to the pull of language that unshackles from binary fixations, dissolves identity and sets in train the exhilaration of an endlessly metamorphic potential. Marion has taught literature and writing in various universities, including Murdoch University, the University of Melbourne and, most recently, at Deakin University. She now lives in Drouin in GunaiKurnai country with her two border collie companions.

Upswell Publishing vision

We publish writers who need to be read; who turn the world upside-down with their insight. Knowing the surge of joy that comes out of a book, we create beautiful objects that will still be in the cultural imagination 100 years on.