Description:
Heimlich Unheimlich probes the concepts of home and belonging after the Second World War.
Brief description: Hazel Smith is a poet, performer, electronic writer and academic. She has published six volumes of poetry including 'The Erotics of Geography', Tinfish Press, 2008, 'Word Migrants', Giramondo, 2016 and 'Ecliptical', ES-Press, Spineless Wonders, 2022. She has published numerous performance and multimedia works, and has performed and presented her work extensively internationally, has been commissioned by the ABC to write several works for radio, and has been co-recipient of numerous Australia Council for the Arts grants. She is a founding member of the multimedia ensemble austraLYSIS. In 2018, with Will Luers and Roger Dean, she was awarded first place in the Electronic Literature Organisation's Robert Coover prize. In 2023 her collaboration with Luers and Dean, 'Dolphins in the Reservoir', was shortlisted for the UK New Media Writing Prize. Hazel is an Emeritus Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. She has authored several academic books including 'Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara', Liverpool University Press, 2000, 'The Writing Experiment', Allen and Unwin, 2005 and 'The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship', Routledge, 2016. With Roger Dean she co-edited 'Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts', Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Her website is at http: //www.australysis.com
Review Quotes:
"Heimlich Unheimlich is a beautiful book that invites the reader to engage with the text in circular ways, coming back to each page to experience it differently each time. It's a memoir and a story but it's also an experience that invites the reader to participate in the making of a self and the ways in which we are interconnected."
- Magdalena Ball writing in Compulsive Reader
"Weaving turns environmental matter into usable material, and it's a strong image in Heimlich Unheimlich. There's a hint of bildungsroman to the weaving process: socialising raw living matter into workable yarn, then weaving yarn into usable cloth. Woven story is very much the mode of Heimlich Unheimlich. Hessian and Muslin are readily identifiable threads, and there are others: the girls' families, cultures left behind, and the Anglophone cultures the children grow into. World War II is backing material, always present as a shaping and locating influence. War as raw material for some, harvest for others: lives cut at the root and people displaced. Some effort of the hands is needed to restore them to flower. As an effort of the hands, there's something very life-affirming in Heimlich Unheimlich. Smith and Karl-Spence are women born on opposite sides of one of history's worst conflicts, terrible in scale and cruelty. They find common human experiences-displacement, longing-and make something beautiful out of it all."
- Chris Arnold, Zero Day, PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2022