Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 199 Winter 2010 · Main Posts / Writing There's a bomb on this train of thought Cameron Fuller Loaded with raw materials: colons, commas, fragments of broken grammar. This poem is wired with faulty rhetoric and ideas strapped to the author’s chest. Sensitive to sudden movement, it won’t reach the final station and its metaphors won’t survive the ride to their logical conclusions. It is not afraid to shout in MAXIMAL CAPS or exclaim emotions are explosive! But it stays silent, containing its secret until the end. It believes poetry is full of risk and targets innocent readers. It spurns the ease of paraphrase and the violence of bullet points. But it can’t afford the precision of laser guided imagery. All it has is the shrapnel of language, the lingua franca of blood connecting the heart and brain. This poem is a dirty bomb. It is designed to detonate when your eyes reach the final word. Cameron Fuller Cameron Fuller is based in Adelaide but has lived in Brisbane, Sydney, Cairns and Canberra. He is a PhD student at the University of South Australia and a poetry co-editor of Wet Ink magazine. More by Cameron Fuller Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 23 February 202324 February 2023 · Writing From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author Rob Horning Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.
