Mal McKimmie – October 16 2016

Australian Aphasia Association – 11th National Conference October 17 & 18 2016

Mal has written poetry since the late 1970s and has performed his works often. He has worked as a survey hand, deckhand, vineyard labourer, fruit-picker, dishwasher, laundry folder and part-time ranger working with wild dolphins and visitors at an eco-tourist resort. He has also worked in welfare with people labelled as having a disability and with people diagnosed with mental illness and has been a poetry tutor and editor, and literary event coordinator. ‘The Brokenness Sonnets 2’ was published in Take Five 08 and other poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. The Brokenness Sonnets I-III & Other Poems won The Age Book of the Year Award for Poetry in 2012. Originally from Perth, Mal now lives and writes in Melbourne.

Poetileptic
Five Islands Press, 2005; ISBN 9781741280920

In this, his first full-length collection of poetry, Mal “has found in affliction striking ways of addressing a contemporary reader’s own brokenness and fragmentation: registering the radical shaking of epilepsy….” (Marion May Campbell, Text) Poems from this debut collection were developed into a feature program by ABC Radio National in 2006.

The Brokenness Sonnets I-III & Other Poems
Five Islands Press, 2011; ISBN 97807349044259
“McKimmie takes us along the ravaged routes of aphasia, along which circumlocution and approximation breed panic and confusion, where punning becomes a stutter and performs the undoing of language and of humanity. Several of the ‘Other Poems’ included here beyond the ‘Brokenness’ sequences weave variations on the major themes of cataclysmic accident, suicide, survival and connectedness; they also consider in a philosophical vein the flipping of fact to metaphor, of homeopathy itself as a kind of cure via metaphor, thus extending the exploration of poetry as a singing out of aphasia.” – Marion May Campbell, Text