Javant Biarujia, Anagoge of Fire

The eight poems that comprise Anagoge of Fire by Javant Biarujia are portraits of Cavafy, Crevel, Genet, Mapplethorpe, Mishima, O'Hara, Rimbaud and Serrano —  all "gay icons" to some extent —  written in Biarujia's voluptuously innovative style, variously described as "quixotically alluring" by Charles Bernstein and "globalised and hermetic, archaic and futuristic" by Chris Edwards, with "the promiscuous or orgiastic lyric" which Michael Farrell goes on to say "fills the gap between the stiff and the coarse was of speaking of sex. It's juicy."

Biarujia is the author of two award-winning plays, several volumes of poetry and numerous literary essays (uncollected). Winner of the inaugural Robert Duncan Poetry Prize, in 1998, his work is widely represented in journals and anthologies in Australia and the United States. Also that year, he was Asialink's writer-in-residence at the University of Indonesia, just after the fall of Soeharto.Low/Life, an exploration of orientalism, was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year prize in 2003, pointcounterpoint: new and selected poems was published in England in 2007 and "Allemo!" Albem, a translation of Rimbaud into the gay lingo Polari, is forthcoming from PressPress.

Rare Object Number 36.
8 pages. Published 2004.
Cover image by Kay Orchison.