The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau

Nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud told his friends in Africa that he had “seen Australia”. But what did he mean by “seen”? Visited? Viewed on the horizon? Imagined? The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau is a book of antipodes-inversions-of the prose poems collected in Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, which Toby Fitch turns upside down, hijacking and re-versing their content. Here you will find collages, redactions, homophonic and metonymic mistranslations, pattern poems, concrete poems and other systematic derangements, some curiously child-like, others warped by the virtual world. Rimbaud’s prose proves fertile ground in which to grow Bloomin’ Notions-poems that see the land Down Under in an other light.

“In The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau, Toby Fitch releases hordes of godless hierodules to hack, frack and adirondack multiversal pathways through the parallel universes of Australian poetry. This is the archive as hi-rise, Rimbaud via Ashbery fed through the Shredder of Babel, where the jackhammered lupids of a Concrete aesthetic ruse, saturate, fold and bend in a ‘double sex heartbeat ribcage jangle’. In this uniquely co-dependent autopoiesis, Fitch has produced an anonymous autobiography that is at once prolifically particular and breathtakingly universal.”- Fiona Hile