John Leonard Press invites you to the launch of

and then when the

by Dan Disney

to be launched by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

Like Max Ernst’s ‘fortuitous meeting of distant realities’, Dan Disney’s sometimes absurd, rhetorically-deft pieces are the result of a questing imagination driving toward knowledge but able to be side-tracked along stranger, imperative paths. This poet is struck by how strongly things exist, and sharpens his focus with an essentialising but experimental lens. The lasting impression of this book is of how beautifully Disney savours the exactness of words in his lines.

Dan Disney
Dan Disney was born in 1970 in East Gippsland, where he grew up. He has worked in psychiatric institutions, paddocks, warehouses, and universities, and currently divides his time between Melbourne and Seoul, where he lectures in twentieth-century poetries at Sogang University. Articles and poems appear in Antithesis, ABR, Heat, Meanjin, New Writing, Overland, Orbis Litterarum, and TEXT, and poems have recently received awards in the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize (2nd) and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize (USA). His first full collection of poems, and then when the, published by John Leonard Press, will be launched at Brett Whiteley Studio.
 
Alongside poems, Dan Disney’s great love is wandering, which often leads to places of sublime strangeness – the docks of Casablanca, where he felt like a morsel in a lair; drinking ‘til sunrise with the king of wind-bitten, north-western Irish island; collectively seasick with 300 Russian pilgrims on their way across the White Sea. He once had lunch in William Wordsworth’s old room at Cambridge; he once was called a prick by a somewhat famous Hollywood director. He was arrested in Prague when it was the capital of Czechoslovakia, and interrogated by border guards in Turkey, Belarus, Laos. He has stood at the foot of Immanuel Kant’s statue and watched an undercover drug bust, and sat on the doorstep of Martin Heidegger’s Black Forest hutte in the rain. He feels comforted to know the world is big enough to contain more wonders than he’ll wonder at, more poems than he’ll ever be able to poem.
www.dandisney.com 

Sunday poetry @ 2pm

The Brett Whiteley Studio hosts regular poetry readings, generally on the fourth Sunday of the month, featuring guest poets and an open mic.

For enquiries, please contact Angela Stretch, coordinator of Sunday poetry@ 2pm
mobile: 0434 898 578  email: angela.stretch@gmail.com