CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Vickery

Ann Vickery is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She is the author of three poetry collections: Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack (Vagabond Press, 2021); Devious Intimacy (Hunter Publishers, 2015); and The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon (Vagabond Press, 2014). She is also the author of Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt, 2007) and Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), and co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009). She recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and has also co-edited Poetry and the Trace (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013). She is currently series editor of Palgrave’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.

Situated Song, Motherhood and Creativity: Ann Vickery Reviews Kate Fagan and Tais Rose Wae

Song in the Grass by Kate Fagan Giramondo, 2024 Riverbed Sky Songs by Tais Rose Wae Vagabond Press, 2023 Both Kate Fagan’s Song in the Grass (Giramondo, 2024) and Tais Rose Wae’s Riverbed Sky Songs (Vagabond Press, 2023) take motherhood …

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Seasonal Feminists

(to Jin Eun-Young) In spring, we planned our futures Yes to a thousand stars cradling the canopy, the hope of power in multitudes. In summer, the fragrant drift Yes to lovers and the early climb across glass peaks, unwalled and …

Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS | Tagged

Perfect Timing

The work of the cloud is lonely and continuous. The rider from Brazil unable to find other work during lockdown. Whose bike and capacity to ride remained unchecked, lucky to leave with just a broken arm. In such jocund company, …

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In a Nutshell

The shape of a son hidden in the tablecloth green. The cherries were painted, smiled as the dish was stirred with the spoon that occasionally doubled as a knife. You had a ready mouth for ripeness. She taught you that …

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Manky Bandaid Sandwich

Mammalian life trying hard not to exist as manky bandaid sandwich. The fillings that serve as the space between us, flesh echoes in the conversational cloud. Miry, like margarine, swan songs of a sensory condition that lies mute, inarticulate, in …

Posted in 93: PEACH | Tagged

Concept Creep

It’s not a reflection on you, climbing the stairs to happiness (what flights?), trying to leave at the door the low-tops of ambivalent love. Whose turn is it to shock absorb the ordinary once more? Emotional labour slides in restaged …

Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII | Tagged

In Confederates we Couple

(Q.E.D.) To speculate on compound vision, the world reprizes: one and one is one. Each arc of a lover’s conjecture creatures toward incendiary light. The soul’s algebra draws upon an angle of landscape at once perishable and precise. We sup …

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Un(dis)closed: Reading the Poetry of Emma Lew

As with contemporaries like Claire Gaskin (Paperweight) and Kate Lilley (Versary, particularly ‘Mint in Box: A Pantoum Set’), Emma Lew has turned to fixed poetic forms like the pantoum and the villanelle. Constraint is both formally enacted and thematically explored.

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On Not Giving an Account of Oneself

for Dann & bindlestiff cyberpunk I am telling a story without prehistory. Pocket rockets of pink, the go to temple of gum blossom. Rays of morning sun settling on the driver’s side. By way of warning, I would say I …

Posted in 78: CONFESSION | Tagged

Popping Candy by the Kerb

This suburb is getting crowded. Trying to Pokémon Go with a Baudelaire avatar and running into the usual night terrors. Replaced footpaths, replaced neighbours, discovering how to accessorise with greys. Can we have a plebiscite vote over the return of …

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

An Object exists only as it might exist to Another

The melancholia of not being Anne Boyer. The melancholia of melancholy, of listening for factories out there in the sea when everyone else was searching for whales. The melancholia of a word without a poem, of the poem as pristine …

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged

Introduction to Claire Nashar’s Lake

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski In Lake, Claire Nashar navigates the connections between people and between person and place in a striking elegy not only for her grandmother, leading geology academic Beryl Nashar, but also for Tuggerah Lake, an estuary …

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Against Colony Collapse Disorder; or, Settler Mess in the Cells of Contemporary Australian Poetry

Colony collapse disorder describes a phenomenon whereby worker bees suddenly and inexplicably disappear from a hive. It has recently been identified as a syndrome following the rapid vanishing of Western honeybee colonies across North America and Europe. Justin Clemens also uses the term to describe an aesthetic collapse, whereby poets can only demonstrate their existence as ‘being caught dead’ given the fragile conditions of poetry and the inevitable, deadly effects of the past.

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MASQUE Editorial

The theme of this issue was suggested by the Poets and Critics seminar (run by Vincent Broqua and Olivier Brossard) on the work of British poet Redell Olsen last year. Olsen’s book Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel (subpress, 2012) revels in masques and anti-masques, in variants and endlessly shifting suggestiveness that has influences back to the sixteenth century but also resonates with Frank O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’.

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Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning

Forearmed is foredefeated, a spragged illusion that had me forever check the silver-leafed backing. What seemed like a vermillion mirror of sea, the work of rash gods competing over nose-powder and light. Salient image as tonnage of froth, the superficial …

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Submission to Cordite 43: MASQUE is now open!

Ann VickeryThis issue is the Masque. It extends an invite to displays of Devices and Mythic Mayhem. It desires to entertain Bold Interiors of Poetic Fancy and Brocaded Rewindings, Lyricised run-ons and flirtatious Kinks in the Narrative. A toying with Masks and Anti-Masks of identity, gender guises and human conceit.

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Vivienne; or, A Little Local History

Style: the Sibyl’s only available expression. Reversible epigrams filched as seasonal must from the fathers. You think assassination a pretext for kindness. Love in the time of your own good collar her bag of ferrets, the hide, not the fathoms. …

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Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems

Gig Ryan asserts that, ‘Poetry is our response to the world, but it’s also the thing we poets find the most taxing, the best of engaging our brains. Ideally – like all good art – it should make us think.’ Yet, as she also acknowledges, meaning is often secondary when reading poetry. That is, it is intensified and made more complex by the poem’s sensual materiality and the affect it may evoke.

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Western Triv

(courtesy of the White Cockatoo) Petersham: the formerly fashionable but now rather heavy overcoat on the portugese tart. Tickertape ribbons and other dictionary entries. Lip-reading Theory of the Leisure Classes, little Ern stumbles through the public primary before graduating to …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged