Join Giramondo poets Lucy Dougan and Michael Farrell as they talk with Chris Arnold about their work, including their most recent collections Monster Field and Googlecholia, both published last year.

Dougan’s Monster Field was released in December, and launched later that month in the Balmoral Hotel – the same venue where this event is being held. The collection draws on and is alive to the mysterious zone that Surrealist artist Paul Nash called the ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed which cannot be found again easily, and which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past your eyes’.

Farrell’s Googlecholia was released in October, and went on to be longlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. As its title suggests, the collection refers to the many-armed search engine, with the poems within alluding to the range of emotional affects and feelings that the Internet induces: pleasure, satisfaction, joy, melancholy, anxiety, schadenfreude, boredom, nausea.

Books by Dougan and Farrell will be sold on the night through Crow Books.

Please arrive at 5.30pm for a 6pm start. While this event is free, RSVPs are strongly encouraged – register via eventbrite here.

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ABOUT LUCY DOUGAN

Lucy Dougan’s first poetry book, Memory Shell, won the Mary Gilmore Award. The manuscript of her second collection, White Clay, won the Arts ACT Alec Bolton Award – it was published by Giramondo in 2008. Her chapbooks Meanderthals (Web Del Sol) and Against Lawns (Picaro) were published in 2011. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), was shortlisted for both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Her latest collection is Monster Field, published in 2022. She works in the arts and university sectors.

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ABOUT MICHAEL FARRELL

Michael Farrell’s collections published by Giramondo include a raiders guide (2008); open sesame (2011), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry; Cocky’s Joy (2015), shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry; and I Love Poetry, which won the 2018 Queensland Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Award; and Googlecholia (2022), longlisted for the 2023 ALS Gold Medal.

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ABOUT CHRIS ARNOLD

Chris Arnold is a poet and programmer who lives and works in Boorloo. His Creative Writing PhD, in the field of electronic literature, was honoured on the UWA Dean’s list. Chris’s poems were shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2022 and 2023.