Poetry. B N Oakman's deceptively conversational tone and wry humor complement writing that is elegant, sometimes confronting, and which shuns obscurity in favor of clarity. He elicits feeling through style, phrasing and understatement rather than by imposing emotion. You'll be drawn into topics ranging from the socio-economic to the personal--the ekphrastic to football--the political to the historical.
Tincture Journal is a quarterly literary journal based in Sydney, Australia and collecting interesting new works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Australia and the world.
Backtrack, BN Oakman’s third full-length collection, is a suite of poems created in response to an observed, often baffling, world. Oakman writes with conviction in a direct and lively style, while employing various poetic forms to explore a wide range of emotions and experiences. He gives us poems crafted with empathy and humour about transient joys, abiding sadnesses, persistent injustices, fleeting triumphs and unassuageable grief – the whole exasperating mess and muddle of it all. Here are poems to engage the mind, touch the heart, nudge us to laughter, and occasionally, move us to tears. BN Oakman’s first book with IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) was In Defence of Hawaiian Shirts (2006). This was followed by Second Thoughts and the audiobook What Did I Know. Reviews From Madrid to Finisterre by way of a morning chorus of magpies Oakman’s poetry speaks with grace and power to the insistence of history and memory but above all to the crucial importance of love. – Valerie Krips, author, The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage and Childhood in Postwar Britain Eschewing the ‘contorted subject matters’ and ‘tortured’ language of his former academic colleagues ¬– as well as of many of his fellow poets writing today – Bruce Oakman is not afraid of being comprehensible. Yet there’s nothing clichéd, simplistic or predictable about his poems. They invest all kinds of everyday themes with a wry subtlety of perception, and a voice as elegant as it’s earthy. Enjoy their ‘expansive splendour’. – Ian Britain, The Making of Donald Friend: Life & Art The poetry in Backtrack is wonderfully unflinching in its focus on loss, injustice and the pain of living our mortal, loving lives. Humour and tenderness are in steady attendance, but it is the poet’s commitment to the truly well-made poem which is the fundamental source of delight. Rich imagery and a narrative skill supported by a beautifully subtle syntactical flare are the bedrock qualities at work here. To read through this deeply moving collection is to experience the unique Oakman blend of intelligence, craftmanship and compassion ‘burning away the dark’. – Ross Gillett, Swimmer in the Dust
B N Oakman finds poetry in the ordinary, the exotic, the political and the aesthetic. No head of State or classical film is safe from his exacting eye, which yields refreshing insights about subjects we thought we already understood.
The book-length tanka collaboration, by Kathy Kituai and Amelia Fielden, YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW, explores the deep and sometimes uncanny relationships between our human experiences and our wider, more tenuous, though no less ambiguous experiences of life. These are poems to be savoured in the mouth and tanka to listen to: they demand to be read aloud, sung.
Tongues of Ash is a literal exploration of the New Zealand landscape through memory, emotion, and spirituality. With passages of wry humour, raw imagery, and insightful observations, Westwater extracts insights from a mysterious landscape.
Sinéad Stubbins has always known that there was a better version of herself lying just outside of her grasp. That if she listened to the right song or won the right (any) award or knew about whisky or followed the right Instagram psychologist or drank kombucha, ever, or enacted the correct 70-step Korean skincare regime, she would become her 'best self'. In My Defence, I Have No Defence raises the white flag on trying to live up to impossible standards. Wild and funny and wickedly relatable, it is one woman's reckoning with her complete inability to self-improve and a hilarious reprieve for anyone who has ever struggled to be better. This is the comfort read of the year from Australia's most exciting new comedy writer.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the military importance of the Hawaiian Islands became clear. Oahu in particular was a key bastion in projecting America's military power in the Pacific. The island was turned into a military fortress and yet it also became the site of one of America's greatest defensive failures, the Japanese attack of December 7, 1941. By the end of World War II, the harbor itself was the most heavily defended in the world, and the island had earned the sobriquet "Fortress Oahu". This title documents the development of the coastal, air and land defense systems that served to protect Pearl Harbor and Honolulu from 1907 to 1950, and seeks to understand why these failed at a critical point.
One man's definition of his gender manifests itself against a backdrop of relationships, family, and society. Satirically challenges the illusions and fantasies of contemporary culture with smart, playful, and surprisingly intimate verse. A blunt and honest account about all the things men never discuss, including taboo subjects.
Ebullient and perverse, thrice married, Barney Panofsky has always clung to two cherished beliefs: life is absurd and nobody truly ever understands anybody else. But when his sworn enemy publicly states that Barney is a wife abuser, an intellectual fraud and probably a murderer, he is driven to write his own memoirs. Charged with comic energy and a wicked disregard for any pieties whatsoever, Barney's Version is a brilliant portrait of a man whom Mordecai Richler has made uniquely memorable for all time. It is also an unforgettable love story, a story about family and the riches of friendship.
