I've just launched a new website for my new book, Catch and Kill.

If you'd like to check out joeldeane.net be my guest.

Here it is finally, the cover of my next book, Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power.

You can read about it and, if you like, order a copy at Readings. They'll mail it to you for free once the book's released on July 29. 

Writing update

I've just about finished the manuscript for a new book. My debut as a non-fiction author.

It's called Catch and Kill: The politics of power and will be published by the University of Queensland Press in 2015.

Looking forward, after that, to completing my third collection of poetry (fourth if you count a chapbook of poetic B-sides) and rewriting my third novel.

Requiem

 

Perhaps those archetypes of immortality,

the beautiful doomed,

have a story to tell after all:

That there is only now.

No golden afternoon just gone.

No promise of a silver morning.

That they are not forever young,

suspended in telegenic animation,

but forever dead instead.

That, unless phrenology has moved on

from the so-called science of the mind

to yet another mismeasure of mankind,

the dead are beyond our vanities.

And that, if anything matters,

if anything does in the long, slow fuck of life—

a car crash in time lapse

where our family sedan slews off the shoulder of the highway,

  over and down,

         down and over

the embankment,

gathering turds of sod in its seams

as it gathers momentum towards a barbed-wire fence

fencing in a gouged creek and orchards burned grey

by salt—

If there is anything to be learned

from these revolutions,

these guttural exclamations,

as our bodies penetrate other bodies

—are perforated themselves—

as the concussion of our manmade capsules

colliding against the blunt trauma of earth continues

for a time less than we imagined,

for longer than we thought possible;

If there is anything to be learned, it is this.

What matters most is that

we love this life we are leaving
and are unafraid of the next.

Read at Federation Square as a part of the Gough Whitlam commemoration on November 5, 2014. 

First published in Magisterium, my second collection of poetry.

New novel, new website


This blog will be going quiet for a while.

The reason for this hiatus is that, with my new novel, The Norseman's Song, coming out in March, I've launched a new website -- www.joeldeane.com

That site also has a new blog, The Norseman's Blog, which I'll be updating regularly.

You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

I'll be keeping an eye on this site, though, and can be contacted via email.