Published: 2007
No of Pages: 158
RRP: 24.95
The Kamikaze Mind
Finalist for Best Multi-Modal Production at the 2007 Enhance TV Atom Awards.
Longlisted from 580 entries for the Australian Publishers Association’s 2007 Book Design Awards.
The Kamikaze Mind is the story of an astronaut who launched himself into a black hole. The recovered fragments of his mind have been organized alphabetically into a witty, whimsical, surprisingly touching and laugh-out-loud funny dictionary of a floating mind. The Kamikaze Mind crosses the boundaries between prose and poetry to deliver a text truly for the 21st century.
“Through an accumulation of broken meanings and definitions, moments of insight, panic, wisdom and longing, Richard Allen’s Kamikaze Mind is a wordbook of the mind. It can also be as freakish, whimsical and as inconceivable as a gaggle of quarks. Yet it’s also an edgy read, complex and sometimes sad – and open both to pleasure and surrender. A truly innovative and original book.” Judith Beveridge
“An astonishing and rich work, pithy and witty, tender and often wise, sad and raunchy, imaginative and very surprising… I found myself constantly wishing to note down quotable quotes… eloquent and moving.” Thomas W. Shapcott
“A poetic take on what wisdom the universe might spit out after a black hole has gobbled an astronaut.” Bernard Lane, The Australian
About the Author
Australian born poet Richard James Allen has combined a unique international career as a writer, performer, choreographer and filmmaker. His award-winning films for his company ‘Physical TV’ have been shown at well over 200 international screen and dance festivals as well as on Australian, Slovenian, US and Chinese television. Richard has published seven books as a poet and performance writer and his writing has appeared in a wide variety of magazines and journals and in major Australian poetry anthologies, including The New Oxford Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Les A. Murray.
The recipient of numerous awards and nominations including two ATOM Awards and a NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlisting for his most recent book of poetry, Thursday’s Fictions, Dr Richard James Allen won the prestigious Chancellor’s Award for the most outstanding PhD thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is the former Artistic Director of the Poets Union Inc., during which time conceived and directed the inaugural Australian Poetry Festival in 1999. He also conceived and co-edited the seminal anthology, Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts, which is used as a textbook in many university courses. Most recently Richard has been involved with cutting edge incursions into poetry and new media, in particular finding new spaces and platforms for literature on mobile phones and in 3D online immersive worlds.