Posted on

the prism and the rose in Landfall

Book cover for the prism and the rose by Schaeffer Lemalu

Reviewed by Erik Kennedy in Landfall Review Online.

For what is essentially a bunch of smashed-up china in a pile, the prism and the rose looks remarkably good. It reads very easily, and even enjoyably. As you can imagine, it’s not simple to quote this kind of writing, even for review purposes. Just say a bunch of film lines in your head and you’ll be halfway there. Other, non-film sources are sampled, too. A book about the Canadian painter Agnes Martin, for example. I had to laugh when I got to ‘REM’, which is almost certainly a copyright violation—it’s just the lyrics to the song ‘Losing My Religion’ with a fun Easter egg of Aram Saroyan’s poem ‘lighght’ smuggled into the famous Michael Stipe line: ‘That’s me in the spotlighght / Losing my religion’.

Posted on

On posthumous publishing in The Spinoff

Book cover for the prism and the rose by Schaeffer Lemalu

Compound Press director Chris Holdaway writes about the process and considerations of posthumously publishing the work of Schaeffer Lemalu (1983-2021).

In February 2022, Schaeffer’s partner Abbey arrived at my home with a jammed filing box containing, in order, every poem he had sent to her over the long years of their relationship. Immense emotional weight aside, we were faced with a number of practical problems deciding how to arrive at a published legacy for the author and the work.

Read on The Spinoff

Posted on

Fragments of an Overheard Conversation Between Two Late-Autumn Roses in a Country Churchyard During the 6th Mass Extinction Event & a Nor’Wester (with a Partially Faded Copy of their Reading Material)

A bucolic dirge by Jasmine Gallagher

Continue reading Fragments of an Overheard Conversation Between Two Late-Autumn Roses in a Country Churchyard During the 6th Mass Extinction Event & a Nor’Wester (with a Partially Faded Copy of their Reading Material)