Dougal McNeill

Dec 1, 2024 | overland.org.au | Samantha Floreani |Liliana Mansergh |Dougal McNeill

“It’s 2am, and I am filming a threesome scene in a hotel suite…” begins Dr Zahra Stardust’s Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance. Stardust goes on to recount her experience at the ninth annual Feminist Porn Awards, where pornographic films were played in an established cinema, replete with popcorn — an unimaginable scenario for readers in Australia, where criminal penalties exist for publicly screening sexually explicit material.

Nov 24, 2024 | overland.org.au | Liliana Mansergh |Dougal McNeill |Francesca Newton

Ellen van Neerven’s collection Comfort Food (2016) is preoccupied with sustenance, survivance, and the conditions of poetic possibility. How is the locus of the poetic here and now maintained? [1] This review reflects on this question through a close reading of “Finger Limes,” the fourth poem of van Neerven’s collection. I propose that there are two ways of understanding poetic sustenance. On the one hand, it is assured through an unfolding and reflexive poetic form.

Nov 4, 2024 | overland.org.au | Dougal McNeill |Francesca Newton |Liam Blackford

“The effect of a tale,” Joseph Conrad wrote in a letter to SS Prawling, “is mostly in the telling of it” (8th Nov, 1897). The facts of Martin Edmond’s tale, in his wonderful book Marlow’s Dream, are easy enough to summarise.

Aug 26, 2024 | newsroom.co.nz | Dougal McNeill

Emily Perkins’ The Forrests (2012), a novel tracing one migrant family’s fortunes and alienations as they settle in New Zealand in the era between the end of the colonial period and into the moment, in official ideologies, at least, of the post-colonial one, begins with an image of dislocation that draws attention to the complexities of representation: “[their] father balanced behind the movie camera, shouting directions as he walked backwards and forwards in front of them.