Joel Ephraims, Flying Car Kaleidoscope
Ephraims works with the premise that the default gear of our world-on-wheels is that of obfuscation, natural and artificial. He brazenly works to refract and thereby clarify the carnival mirror imbroglio upon whose celestial surface we daily reflect and reside. Through surrealistic and absurdist poems Ephraims seeks to make sense of a post-ironic world. His work sits easily in the company of absurdist anti-poets like James Tate and Tomaž Šalamun, bringing a raucous and ludic intellectual agility to Australian poetry, enlightening the experimental peripheries of Australian poetics with a heavy dose of insight, humour and heart.
‘Ephraims’ work is repeatedly caught up in the question of poetry and what it can do for human consciousness, for society and for Earth. His poetic endeavour is fractal and complex; it makes fun of the over-arching concerns of capitalism […] while challenging linear conventions and dragging the reader involuntarily into the fabric of the poem, to be represented and to look—as if in a mirror, through light, through water, to Earth’s ancient core, where we vibrate, most clearly ourselves.’ LUCIA MOON
‘Ephraims’ work is linguistically exuberant and risky, wryly insightful, and bubbles over with irreverent wit and surprising juxtapositions, all of which serves to amplify its passages of strange and unusual beauty.’ Jaya Savige
Joel Ephraims is a second-generation Sri Lankan migrant whose father’s family left Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 60’s to escape the then increasingly ethnocratic government’s oppressive language policies. Joel is a NSW South Coast poet who writes with a surreal, political and autobiographical style. In 2011 he won the Overland Judith Wright Prize for new and emerging poets and in 2016 he won the Overland NUW Fair Australia prize for poetry. In 2013 his chapbook of poems Through the Forest was published with Australian Poetry and Express Media’s New Voices Series and in 2016 he was commissioned to write and record a suite of poems by Red Room Poetry as part of their project ‘The Disappearing.’ He began a PhD in creative writing at the University of Sydney in 2021 with his thesis focused on the composition of an experimental novel, 15238, that explores the ethical and procedural dynamics of NLP (Natural Language Processing) AI. In 2022 he published his first full-length collection of poetry, Biota, with the experimental small press Apothecary Archive and was awarded the David Harold Tribe Postgraduate Research Fellowship by the University of Sydney, who also awarded him the Stanley Sinclair Bequest Scholarship in 2023.
Joel Ephraims, Flying Car Kaleidoscope
October 2024. 148mm x 210mm. 96pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-69-7
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
