The strongest of these poems tackle urban living from the lower depths, upwards. Avoiding the money and bullshit end of town, they make vivid the cruddy vitality of Sydney's clubs and pubs; squats and public housing; fringe venues where non-commercial plays are staged (receiving mixed responses, see `Alibi') and where poets perform, sometimes winging it, as do `Angel & the Butch Balladeer' in the eponymous (very witty) poem. A homage to a grandfather collages evocative detritus-postcards from a First World War digger amidst the accelerating drift of post-Second World War lifeways. History is also shown via the gay scene and Mardi Gras—once a political march, now a TV special featuring "camera smiles/ sparkle for sale".

Narrative poems, long and short (e.g. `urban blight', `living statues') are the book's best, with crunched-down syntax and some graphic images, plus trouble taken to nuance socio-emotional complexities: `top sorts' is about a shower tea in a pub, as rowdy and rough as the post-industrial backwater where it's set—yet as poem it's fresh, poignant, memorable. The focus is strongly on women, as in, for example, `elsewhere in the city', whose sharply drawn protagonists young, rebellious, seeking poetry and/or escape are treated empathically, yet stay in the mind as emblematic good-timers who've partied a shade too long and hard. They're self-betrayers, but the hustling, hyped-up city has also used and abused them. Rue, in these poems, is extended into collective life: the twist-endings clarify the bitterness that comes after energy, money and/or time have been spent on promises that entice and exploit but don't make good.

The poems are equally lively on country matters—'visitor at home' won the 2002 Leonard Teale Performance Prize at the Gulgong (NSW) Henry Lawson Festival. It's a rousing portrait of a man who "understood the way of wars"—ex-RAAF, terminally defensive, unavailable or plain brutal to the wife and kids. Cafe Boogie is an emotionally literate trip through some of the small-and-larger-scaled battlegrounds of contemporary life; it's big-hearted enough to laugh at some of the furies driving it — and bounce on.

— Kerry Leves, Overland

Café Boogie If you ever wonder what big city life is like, part of the answer can be found in Jenni Nixon’s Café Boogie. The big city is Sydney where Nixon, formerly an actor with the Queensland Theatre Company, now lives and works as a performance poet.

Interactive Press in Brisbane have brought out her book in their Emerging Author’s Series which “showcases the best emerging Australian literary talent.” The milieu Nixon writes about and moves amongst includes Sydney’s bohemian culture and lesbian and gay communities — part poetry slam, part Mardi Gras. That Jenni Nixon is a survivor is evident from the fact that her record of the city’s subcultures spans more than thirty years and from her chubby smiling face in the author photograph. Many of those she writes about were not so lucky. Their young lives were cut short by AIDS, drug overdoses, and violence. Nixon’s compassion is not overstated. It is enough to have noticed and recorded: ‘this is what being young is all about experimentation trust mixed with danger smell of leather stale perfume whips of pleasure words of pain sweet really.’

The poet is not out to shock but to entertain and this means to ‘tell it like it is.’ Her poem Visitor at Home won a prize at the Henry Lawson Festival in 2002: ‘a visitor at home brawling with mum waiting to go back to the club to be with men who understood the way of wars.’ Although there are a number of formal poems, including a villanelle, most of the work appears on the page as dense blocks of text punctuated by spaces, as in the examples above. They demand the poet at the microphone — the vitality of performance — but lacking that, I was entertained and not a little moved by such an intelligent observer of the nitty-gritty in the city. Jenni Nixon makes it plain that she is not just a spectator, but a participant.

— Robin Fry, New Zealand Poetry Society


Jenni Nixon’s book is a journey of salvage through some hard lessons and difficult times, told in a way that is atmospheric and immediate, often with a wry twist. Café Boogie is full of earned work that celebrates awareness gained whilst honouring the losses and counting the costs, including some significant deaths of family, friends and muses taken by age, AIDS or addictions. It is about people who “make up for loss with more loss”, where self-acceptance is the harder road. Nixon’s background in theatre and performance are obviously influential in the writing. Using bold phrasings and syntax, determined to keep it real, she records a life lived in and around Sydney’s bohemian culture and lesbian and gay communities from the 1970s to the present—the drugs, gossip, politics and drama; the loves, friendships and lost time. Although mainly narrative in her style, Nixon does not shy away from political protest; she cuts to the chase and not even the Dalai Lama or her own milieu and persona escape.

— Jill Jones


Nixon is a captivating performer. Her poetry of city and country life is sharp, can be poignant and is full of fun. This is exciting, different and memorable.

— Blue Mountains Gazette