The Imageless World

Synopsis

Through momentary glimpses and unaddressed, unsigned missives, The Imageless World evolves into a snapshot of contemporary experience – its anxieties, intimacies, absurdities and occasional horror. Dipping between parody and mourning, Brennan’s first collection of poetry interrogates the possibilities of friendship and community, casting a dark lucidity on strangely familiar territory. Ranging over gene manipulation and child slavery, rhesus monkeys and monks, Toranas and karaoke, dismembering Greeks and Japanese tatooes, Mali and the shoes of the first world, hip-hop clips and Mallarmé, jilted lovers and Christ entombed, The Imageless World puzzles over the joys and deficiencies of language and human being before the deluge of the contemporary. At once celebratory and critical, defiant and open-hearted, Brennan’s poetry offers the black humour and intimacy of a polaroid mixed with the meditative and fragmentary logic of a dream.

Reviews of this Book

‘The letters Brennan has posted throughout The Imageless World work to create traces of worlds that exist only as languaged moments, or momentary presences, including the most intimate. Brilliant, devilish, harrowing, profound, Brennan is writing for the twenty-first century.’ —J.S. Harry

‘Michael Brennan writes a poetry attuned to the impossible, a poetry responsive to what in friendship and passion resist representation. If the world he evokes is imageless it is because, as Shelley said, the deep truth is imageless. Equally, Brennan’s world is imageless because it is wholly present: even absence is felt as a brooding presence in these extraordinary poems of lost love and mourning. A flux, a passage, a taking place: such is the presence of this stunning first collection.’ —Kevin Hart

‘The poems in Michael Brennan’s first collection, The Imageless World, entice the reader with a slow-burn lucidity, skillfully peppered by a cheeky erudition.’ —Dorothy Porter

‘Brennan is a master of the ellipse.… for its musicality, strangeness and power [The Imageless World] is an astonishingly beautiful work. In years to come, it will surely be seen as one of the most important débuts of this generation of poets.’ —David McCooey, Australian Book Review

‘If our generation needs a reminder of Orpheus Brennan is it.’ —Michael Farrell, Antipodes