Luke Carman, the circle of life, and the world as an ecstatic masterpiece

By Claire Corbett, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of Technology Sydney

It’s one of those circle of life kind of things, the antagonist Hopper says in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, explaining how his gang of marauding grasshoppers exploit the ants with a dry cynicism that Luke Carman might appreciate. It wasn’t until I reached the final story in Carman’s collection An Ordinary Ecstasy that this phrase came to mind, as the structure of the book resolved itself into an Ouroboros: the snake biting its own tail…

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