CONTRIBUTORS

Stuart Cooke

Stuart Cooke's latest book is The grass is greener over your grave (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023). He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing & Literary Studies at Griffith University.

4 Juan Paulo Huirimilla Oyarzo Translations by Stuart Cooke

Regarding the 4 Sonnets of the Apocalypse

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5 Gabriela Mistral Translations

Gabriela Mistral is a central figure in 20th Century Latin American poetry. She was the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize (in 1945), and to this day is the only Latin American woman to have won the …

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2 Translated Marcos Konder Reis Poems

Image courtesy of Museu Histórico de Itajaí. Map To the north, the bright tower, the plaza, the eternal meeting, Forever the silent agreement with your face. To the east, ocean, green, waves, foam, That distant ghost, boat and fog, The …

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Wharf

prose is tense sense an echo’s an open poem we sort our rubbish into three bins we sort out rubbish on an island’s edge the sea lurches into rivulets between rocks of prose; prose is a tense sense these things …

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Stuart Cooke Reviews Francisco Guevara

At the time of his death, Francisco Guevara – ‘Kokoy’ to everyone who knew him – was becoming a unique, unwavering presence in contemporary Filipino poetry. An unlikely graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (reports suggest that he was repeatedly stymied by the rituals of the workshop lyric), in 2010 he returned home to the Philippines to take up a position at De La Salle, one of the country’s most prestigious universities.

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High Tide

tide memory trains down the beach the sea chops & eats itself rocks doze in purple sets of allthepossible opens the path back home’s washed over the arabesques cooling into space on another turn it’s smooth as linen a bed …

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Blade

The premonition was that I’m asleep, sleeping sensibly, believing it takes more violence to wake us than daybreak. – ‘The Premonition’, by John Mateer Monday morning, another black death in custody, the world emerging from the misty firmament her long, …

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

4 Melancholic Songs by Rubén Darío

Born in Nicaragua as Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, Rubén Darío (1867-1916) is one of the most famous and influential of all Latin American poets. Generally credited with initiating the modernismo movement, he has had a profound impact upon Latin American …

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Magpie

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Double Shudder

In ancestor times hills cried creeks, pines jammed into species, pierced cielo. The two cities spoke in season colour, colour behind eyelid colour, ebony bay scratched with lights. Despite their buildings’ calcified retinas, despite the torrents del concreto buckling with …

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

The Centre Cannot Hold: 6 Contemporary Filipino Poets

More than 92 million people live in the Philippines, making it the world’s 12th most highly-populated country. Given that many of these millions speak English as a second language, the Philippines is also one of the world’s largest English-speaking nations.

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Opera

After each useless, ephemeral voyage I return to the house and its quay; I circle the edge before skittling off to the suburbs. Come to me, I cry, fat plastic and screaming sail, shining, golden city cramped and seeping music! …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Valparaíso and Tourist

Before the broken edges of an old city’s coast; before the waves breaking on the wharves; a city lost in the fog tumbling in from the ocean, in snakes of fog sliding down from the mountains, I’m tumbling through skins …

Posted in 46: ELECTRONICA | Tagged

Stuart Cooke Reviews Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

From at least as far back as Heraclitus, scholars have been warning us about the irresistible and irretrievable nature of history. The past provides little that is stable, other than an unwavering reminder of the constancy of change. The task of entering history, therefore, is fraught with complications.

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Oil on Air (바람의 유화)

To think of all the expectant creatures circling about, the gulls circling, the white cat dozing into orbits beside me, the crystalline drift of an ant colony between lines, even the eruption of the gangly palm, over time, would swirl …

Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK) | Tagged ,

Volcano Meditation (화산 명상)

All the best men are interested in other men, or their forearms are strong and lightly haired. All the best men are already without that which they need no longer. So it is that each woman, adrift, ends up with …

Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK) | Tagged ,

Common I (DISCO REMIX)

I lack, unlike the others, a menagerie of identities. I was a bright-eyed ingénue at the agency after-party, coked-up, Scarlatti played his cement rib, the tulips were thoroughly roasted, narcotic, terse. Who was Allen Ginsberg? (The incline runs to golden …

Posted in 41: CC - THE REMIXES | Tagged

sueltame rocky coast smelter

sueltame hermana media hermana nada mas que un acquaintance an accident historic agujero negro never negro never the home place never the broken home platitudes only the sucios make you sweat second hand I came to understand la ley de …

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged

Pastoral Editorial

When we began throwing around ideas for this issue, the notion of 'Pastoral' first came up as a joke. Because ever since god knows when, for reasons that always seem to depend on one's thoughts regarding the generation of '68, …

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Stuart Cooke: Conversation with the Bird Man

I came back telling them all about the landscape but he he in particular said no I don't agree the air is clearer the clouds more discernable but the rosellas I cried they sung like madmen on high speed dubbing …

Posted in 32: MULLOWAY | Tagged

Stuart Cooke: Swansea Foreshore

We caught a finely spun flight of aluminium silk through the slow Swansea light. Sunset dredged copper, dwindled histories over mangrove forests; we flew over metal mist while seeping, seeping up from the water grey prisms frayed into salt-fine arms …

Posted in 32: MULLOWAY | Tagged

Stuart Cooke Reviews Michael Farrell

Apart from a solitary '1,' the first page of a raiders guide is blank. Note the presence of the comma. What it suggests of the pages that follow is a transience between the concrete ('.') and the absent (' '). The book's entry functions as much as a point of departure as one of beginning; we all delve into different interstices. So we come to the first poem: unanchored by a table of contents (which, along with page numbers, a raiders guide does not have) yet, unlike the rest of the poems, it is ordered into dense blocks of text.

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Broome Beach Art

we sit by the o cean paddocks sipping moisture from salty scars this is the blee ding the in terminable drift sourcewards by opening the wet eye we can leave the bushy one c losed losen up read currents swells …

Posted in 31: SECRET CITIES | Tagged

Edge Music

So, Yes, she said – because, you see, I had been walking along Maroubra Beach with my T-shirt off in the late morning of a windy day, with flat lazy surf in dribbles and splashes and my need to do …

Posted in 28: INNOCENCE | Tagged