- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
CONTRIBUTORS
Caitlin Maling
Cicadas
After Dimitra Harvey In my marriage we argue over building, offer each other tenders, bid on chores. I read my friend’s poem about cicadas, each season of stanzas carefully kneaded. She is a cook, bakes cakes so real the sugar …
Posted in 111: BABY
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Caitlin Maling Reviews Dennis Haskell, Maree Dawes, Amy Lin and Miriam Wei Wei Lo
It’s a flourishing time for Western Australian poetry and publishing. We have seen the well-publicised launch of Terri-Anne White’s press Upswell (responsible for Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award’s shortlisted Clean) as well as the retention and success of UWA Publishing (who are currently bringing us the collected works of John Kinsella), while existing houses Magabala Books (home to Charmaine Papertalk Green, Ambelin Kwaymullina, and Elfie Shiosaki) and Fremantle Press (Andrew Sutherland’s 2022 Paradise: Point of Transmission having just been shortlisted for the Small Press Network Book of the Year) go strength-to-strength.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Amy Lin, Caitlin Maling, Dennis Haskell, Maree Dawes, Miriam Wei Wei Lo
NO THEME 12 Editorial
We have had the honour of editing this issue as two poets with collections published and forthcoming with Fremantle Press, and invited by Kent in the spirit of ‘shining a light’ on the thriving and amorphous field and bush that might be called ‘Western Australian poetry’.
Posted in 109: NO THEME 12, ESSAYS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Nadia Rhook
Submission to Cordite 109: NO THEME 12
We are now up to one dozen issues where there is no theme.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Carolyn D Wright, Kent MacCarter, Nadia Rhook
Plague
i) Walking in white socks, you watch the black dots jump and stick, trying to feel their way to where the blood is easier. Somehow they don’t sting and pinching them doesn’t crack, instead your blood is there on your …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Diego’s Head
‘when[ever] I draw or sculpt or paint a head from memory it always turns out to be more or less Diego’s…’ Giacometti etd in. James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, circa 1964), p. 24. …
Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Conversion
I watch people gain weight. Not in the way a man on the internet pays a woman in another state to eat red velvet cake over a webcam does. But in the way of tides and sandbanks, or tulips emerging …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Caitlin Maling Reviews Ellen van Neerven
Poems about food, such as those comprising Ellen van Neerven’s first collection Comfort Food, are often framed in terms of ideas of connection, community, and commonality. Van Neerven engages directly with these ideas, but emphasises their fault lines as much as their strengths. The poem I keep returning to appears early in the second of the book’s six loose sections.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Ellen van Neerven
The Falling
I want the building that stretches up past the top of the white like driving up a summer road into heat-haze that ends, might end, here with low gray and I never noticed the sky. Why fear what’s out of …
Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Recommendations for a Western Australian Coastal Pastoral
I am thinking about limits. The gaps between limits. Liminal, littoral spaces. The most fundamental part of ‘human’ consciousness is defined by lack of limits. Unless it is limited by life and death which are themselves littoral rather than literal …
Posted in 74: NO THEME V
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Caitlin Maling Reviews Alison Whittaker
Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker’s debut collection Lemons in the Chicken Wire is a necessary addition to contemporary poetry. Deftly handled at both the level of the poem and the book, Whittaker’s work introduces us to the worlds of queer Aboriginal women living on the rural fringe of New South Wales.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alison Whittaker, Caitlin Maling
Review Short: Alex Skovron’s Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems
While I was walking in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston with my cousin, I found myself discussing the conversations I seem doomed to repeat, the seemingly circular unending ones I’ve had over years, with myself and others without resolution.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alex Skovron, Caitlin Maling
Directions
Karinjini by way of Kataby, Geraldton, Dongara, Carnarvon, Exmouth; by way of the Brand; by way of driving out at midnight, by way of fences and flametrees and bardi; by way of moonlight and the dog-star, the cross and Corona …
Posted in 61: NO THEME III
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Eurydice Speaks
(after Edward Hirsch) I You didn’t know how I hid my head in darkness, a child in the oak avoiding moonlight. How I could touch with only closed curtains, snuffed candle lingering in hair, in breath. How your skin burnt …
Posted in 60: SILENCE
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Planting Roots: A Survey of Introductions to Ecopoetry and Ecocriticism
This year the most comprehensive attempt at anthologising American ecopoetry was released in the form of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Fisher-Wirth & Gray-Street). This work comes in the wake of increased ecoconsciouness in political, social, personal, academic and poetic spheres. This is the year that President Obama announced ‘global warming is real’ and all of America was forced, finally, to listen. Critical work addressing the ecological context of poetry, specifically ecocriticsm, has existed since Scigaj’s Four Eco-Poets (1999) and was expanded in Bryson’s Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002); yet, while these works do a lot to initiate the conversation over what could be considered ecopoetry, it was not until The Ecopoetry Anthology that an attempt to gather and present the poetry itself was made in earnest.
Caitlin Maling Reviews Randolph Stow
In his masterful and extensive introduction to The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems John Kinsella, who edited the volume, writes that much of Randolph Stow’s work is metaphoric, weaving things together in a way that promises narrative but actually reveals very little. Reading through this new selected poems, I was struck by the tension of poetry as public utterance of private speech, which characterizes Stow’s work. Whether dealing with myth, landscape, colonialism or love, these are poems that are selective in what they choose to reveal and particular in the techniques they use to reveal.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, John Kinsella, Randolph Stow
Tacit Knowledge
Driving back from Zavalla at 5pm along some road towards Courpsville wondering exactly what I’m meant to watch the ice do on the bridge. This morning a snake came up from the undergrowth and I didn’t know whether it could …
Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC
Tagged Caitlin Maling
