Product Description
Shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
“This is generous poetry. Out to Lunch is a book of sustenance, pleasure and tender anatomies of living. These poems have conscience and gratitude; a sense of the momentous in ordinary things. Feast and savour. Delicacies will stick in your teeth—and you’ll want them there.” — Meredith Wattison
“When we put Kissane’s almost telepathic empathy, his political subtlety and his humour together with his wide-ranging technical skills we have an Australian poet who is both a pleasure to read and a likely candidate for the best half-dozen or so of his generation.” — Geoff Page, Canberra Times
“A childlike perspective on life makes Out to Lunch a breath of fresh air in the solemnity of many other poetry collections that explore family dynamics and the elusive self. The poems are beautiful aural/oral creations… lovely to recite, perform and enjoy.” — Judges’ Comments, Shortlist, NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry
Andy Kissane is originally from Melbourne and now lives in Sydney with his partner and daughter. He writes fiction and poetry and has published one novel and two collections of poetry. He has worked as an editor, a producer of audio books and has taught creative writing at four universities.
REVIEWS
“Kissane writes accessible, unpretentious, often humourous, subtly thoughtful poems. They use language that isn’t a long way from the vernacular, what you might overhear at the food court or the pub, eavesdropping. But it is a language carefully calibrated to heighten the sense of the momentous within the everyday. Not to eclipse the everyday, but to attend to it – something like the effect of a film slowing down, heightening the meaning of small gestures, glances and events. It is a deliberate effect, sure, but it’s entirely unforced and natural.”- ANDY JACKSON, Mascara Literary Review
