Googlecholia

The title of his new collection Googlecholia 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.

The poems in Googlecholia 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 Best of Australian Poems 2021 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.

About the Author

Michael Farrell’s previous collections include raiders guide; open sesame (shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award); Cocky’s Joy (shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry); I Love Poetry, which won the 2018 Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2019 NSW Premier’s Awards, and Family Trees. His critical monograph, Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention, was published by Palgrave in 2015.