About

Jayne Fenton Keane has that rare talent of combining challenging performance and acutely insightful and incisive words. Published widely in Australia and overseas, her work has attracted critical acclaim from a range of contemporary writers and reviewers. Ophelia's Codpiece, her third published collection, demonstrates her skill and virtuosity with the verse novel, providing a feminist and poststructuralist take on Shakespeare's tragic tale.

Proudly published by Post Pressed

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Reviews

Jayne's work is brave, innovative, strong and original.

Alicia Sometimes, Going Down Swinging.

Jayne Fenton Keane tops my list of cutting edge poets/artists. Her poetic voice speaks of the 'now' and pushes you into the 'new' while displaying a sensuality and spatial awareness few poets are able to convey. JFK is a leading contemporary poet for the new millennium.

Doug Poole, Blackmail Press.

The poetry of JFK has a broad range of concerns, its most outstanding quality resides in its powerful critique of human relationships, especially female-male relationships. Jayne brings to this area of investigation an astonishing innovation of perception along with a brilliant control of language.

Dr Nigel Krauth, Griffith University.

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Extracts

Ophelia Becoming Moon
for Clio, Erato and Polyhymnia.

Every few centuries a woman of poetic genius appears, who may be distinguished by three clear secondary signs: learning, beauty, and loneliness. Robert Graves

You write poems that glow under water. That are sixteen kilometres round. That taste of drowning.

You bite off the sky. Trace its secrets. So that mystery orbits around knowing. Satellite dish of drowning. Speak in rivers. Fill up the hollows with these twisting schools of silver mouths.

"How I hold you in my hand is less than sky and more than entanglement. I can only see you as this curved ribbon of absence. Apostrophe singing birds, perched like commas. All from inside this water." This is what the shells heard.

53,760 kilometres of apostrophes in her eyes. Mean velocity of abandonment. His eyes an exclamation mark of bird. Sharp, volatile edges of calling. She has a rendezvous with subtraction. Her madness, his madness.

Breeding moons. Conjuring planets. Takes time out from a head full of drowning. Discovers that forever lives inside weightlessness.

 

Economic Rationalism

Along arteries of streetlights
keys turn in locks and empty black rooms are entered.
[the proof is infra red]

Economic Rationalism
        =
a theory that does not belong to the world.

Economic Rationalism became entirely bored with itself and
chose to appear here disguised as a beginning that
encompassed everything. In the end it let everybody down.

Greed exists deeper than its representation.
Extinction cannot speak up for itself.

A moment slips through a draft of light.
An inky residue creeps under the door.

Behind there is silence except for TV
and theme park dinners
spinning on glass carousels...

www.js.spokane.wa.us/kimerav3n2/keane.htm#economic

Back to the in tray
and the travel brochure hidden in the drawer.

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