Ali Alizadeh

his collection of poems speaks to an individual’s place and emotions during war. The wars depicted in this volume – the ‘history wars’, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, ‘the war against terror’, ‘the clash of civilisations’, etc – form the background against which the speaker’s language seethes and writhes. These fractured lyrics – or ‘antiheroic couplets’ – take place in a volatile space in the aftermath of ancient conquests and prior to future atrocities. Here the medieval Persian poet Rumi is seen escaping the Mongolian hordes; Satan debates Archangel Michael at the battle of Heaven and Hell; the Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin contemplates the Holocaust; an imprisoned writer becomes a saviour and a revolutionary radical is branded traitor; an account of the author’s experiences of the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the war with Saddam Hussein is narrated; and contemporary Australia is seen as a nation engaged in an unremitting conflict against the land’s original inhabitants and its Asian neighbours. History and a desire for peace form the central discourse of this book’s poems that deconstruct the desire for war, undermine the beliefs in religious and cultural identity that often provoke wars, and advocate non-participation and a rejection of the glorification of ‘us’ and the demonisation of the ‘other’. Also included in this volume are love poems and translations from works of Sufi mystics to show that the opposite of war is, if not always allowed, then at the very least imaginable in these times of hostility and conflict.

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‘You know what this poem means Bahram? It’s about love, and loneliness. The reed is cut off from the other reeds. So it wants to return, but it can’t. So it cries instead, and every time someone blows into the reed flute, it’s the sad song of the reed’s loneliness that makes people cry, the sad story of its loneliness and yearning for love.’
The New Angel is the moving story of Bahram and Fereshteh (Persian for ‘angel’) growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. At its centre this is a love story between two adolescents at odds with the society in which they live and of the ways in which our lives can be changed forever by external events over which we have no control. The author lived in Iran until the age of 14 before immigrating to Australia. The result is a novel that is hugely evocative and that indirectly conveys through story the destructive impact of fundamentalism on the individual.

Alizadeh writes superbly of the pains and beauties of adolescence and the devastating ways in which catastrophic events can shape out thoughts and actions. Bahram and Fereshteh capture our hearts, and ultimately break them. The New Angel engages and disturbs the reader as it moves with suspense and purpose towards its startling climax.

“Alizadeh is a rare writer. He expresses his contemporary thinking in a beautiful, lyrical prose as well as in the poetry of the past. The New Angel is at once provocative and enjoyable, an explosive debut novel that is destined to divide opinion.”
– George Papaellinas, author of Ikons and No.

A vanished, tattered black and white photograph, taken in Tehran in 1946. The image of a sombre and inscrutable middle-aged man called Salman Fuladvand, a lieutenant and controversial police chief under Iran’s second last king. It is the memory of this photograph that begins Ali Alizadeh’s story of his grandfather Salman’s life, spanning Salman’s youthful devotion to the advancement of his country and the emancipation of Iranian women, his conflicts with the shahs, his wrongful imprisonment, and his eventual embracing of Sufi mysticism.
Iran: My Grandfather is a rare mix of narrative, memoir, history and personal exploration. It recounts Iran’s journey from progressive idealism to the ravages of tyranny, imperialism and religious reaction. It is a testament to the mistakes of the past and the present, an examination of family and identity, and an interrogation of the meaning of home and belonging. As Alizadeh writes, this story is ‘a thread to show the path out of the labyrinths’.

‘Iran, My Grandfather is a work of recovery, resistance, and affirmation. I think one can say without risk of hyperbole that it is one of the most remarkable texts ever to have been published in Australia.’ John Kinsella

Alizadeh finds grace, wit and fire in this latest volume of poetry.

if we can see

death looming, like a dark island
on the navigator’s horizon

then we won’t be shocked when
time’s run out. This means

a life without our primal fear. That’s why
we travel.

In the spaces between evanescence and memory, Alizadeh finds grace, wit and fire. From the opening poem’s hymn to mobility and renewal to the elegiac ending, from Tehran to the Gold Coast, Ashes in the Air sparks with wisdom and energy.

An electric collection of fiction from the Prime Minister’s Prize shortlisted author

Transactions, the second work of prose fiction by Ali Alizadeh, presents a provocative and panoramic view of our contemporary world. Spanning themes such as immigration and globalisation, war and poverty, human trafficking and global warming, sexual abuse and exploitation, and love and survival, the book highlights the complexities and traumas of the modern world.

Based on his extensive world travels and his experiences migrating from Iran to Australia as a teenager, Ali has created a manuscript of story cycles (connected stories and characters) that is both shocking and humorous, often at the same time. These are ‘global’ stories in their setting and their themes, featuring characters such as a spoiled Emirati rich girl, an Iranian asylum seeker in Amsterdam, a Liberian refugee seeking aid from a charity, a Ukrainian prostitute, a Danish sex trafficker and a Chinese gamer.
These stories offer something exciting and new in contemporary fiction. Stylistically and thematically, Transactions is fresh and adventurous; the characters living on the edge of what is considered civilised society, often caught between East and West and in the web of global politics.

This essay explores the aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht’s compositions of poetry with photography in the so-called photo-epigrams of his 1955 book War Primer. The photo-epigrams have mostly been viewed and appreciated as interventions in photography; but in this essay I aim to show their novelty and efficacy as poetic inventions. To do so, I draw on Karl Marx’s and Walter Benjamin’s views apropos the decline of poetry under modern, industrial capitalism to argue that Brecht, in his photo-epigrams, is responding to—and attempting to counter—a specific problem at the heart of modern poetry: the crisis in perceptibility and accessibility. By coupling poems with photographs—in unique and uniquely politicised ways—Brecht provides a resonant critique of the deadly ideologies of the ruling classes engaged in World War II, as well as a method for addressing the decline in the readability of poetry in the modern era.

Despite Karl Marx's overwhelming focus on economics and politics – culminating in Capital: Critique of Political Economy – his philosophy has inspired an array of Marxist or Marxian theories regarding the arts. Yet, the key tenet of these theories has not been Marx's radical emphasis on the foundational role of production in human subjectivity. Marxist theories of art have, generally speaking, either examined the arts' capacity for signifying social relations and class struggle – as seen in many a Marxists' penchant for realism – or they have seen the arts as little more than aesthetic legitimations of ruling class ideology, a view which, in its most positive manifestation, can be found in the experimental and modernist tendency to undermine the morals and mores of the bourgeoisie by committed artists. Neither of these approaches, at any rate, sees art as a form and outcome of production in itself. In this article, I wish to present a Marxian theory of art, based on ...

Contemporary Australian poetry, as with many other forms of contemporary cultural production, has often been viewed as a postmodern phenomenon. In his influential 2007 essay “Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism”, for example, the poet and critic David McCooey has described the dominant mode of new Australian poetry as a hybrid negotiation of innovation (‘new’) with tradition (‘lyricism’) that deconstructs the oppositional drive of past avant-gardisms. But this perspective, whilst persuasive in discussing the work of a number of dominant poetic voices, appears insufficient in accounting for the complex work of the newer Australian poets whose poems break with thematic, aesthetic, and conceptual tenets of a postmodernist poetic doxa. This paper argues that the work of such contemporary poets can be best viewed through the prism of philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of inaesthetics. Is Postmodernism Dead? Postmodernism, it seems, has as many lives as a cat. It is, to mix metaphors, an undead vampire that rises from its cultural grave soon after vampire-hunters of various critical persuasions have triumphantly claimed to have put the nails in the movement’s coffin. But is—or should that be was?—postmodernism a cultural and philosophical movement, on par with other relevant twentieth century isms such as Futurism and Existentialism? And, if so, should it start with capital ‘P’? – or is it a much more mercurial and complex phenomenon? Howsoever one may define postmodernism—a task which is of some relevance to this paper—it can be observed that since the end of the twentieth century and particularly in the so-called post-9/11 world, many a cultural expert has pronounced postmodernism dead. This may the result of, among other things, the predominance of postmodernistically-incorrect grand

That this admission should be made by one of the avant-garde poets who had, in her fellow Imagist Ezra Pound's words, tried to “resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry,”(1298) is instructive. HD's apparent candor can be read as an admission of defeat in the face of the ...