MacCarter’s third poetry collection is a strange, restless piece of contemporary Australian writing.

His poems are stitched together from medical language, consumer debris, technological vocabulary, American and Australian vernacular, pop culture and bits of historical detritus. One review rather accurately calls the collection “chaotic, original, weird and brilliant”; elsewhere it has been described as operating somewhere between poetry and non-fiction. 

There’s a lot of pleasure in the friction. Frank O’Hara, Howard Arkley and August Kleinzahler sit alongside angiocrine factors, Geiger counters, thalidomide, terminal smoking lounges and institutional glass. MacCarter uses that collision less to make neat arguments than to reproduce the texture of contemporary consciousness: information arriving faster than significance can organise it. It’s abrasive in places, funny in others, and deliberately resistant to conventional lyric coherence.

Transit Lounge, Melbourne, 2014. First edition. Paperback. Very light shelf wear to covers, with minor rubbing and handling marks only. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Near fine condition.