CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming is the author of three books: The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems (from Te Herenga Waka University Press) and Song of Less (Cordite Books). Her honours include the Biggs Poetry Prize, the Verge Prize for Poetry, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize from the Hunter Writers’ Centre, a Creative New Zealand writing fellowship, and a residency with the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Her manuscript Dirt was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest. She works as a lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University, and writes about staying awake on the precipice of total ecological shitfuckery.

http://www.joanflemingpoet.com/

‘Like all change, it happens in the margins’: Joan Fleming in conversation with Jeanine Leane

Jeanine Leane and I met in the Spring of 2022 to plot this interview over coffee. Jeanine has a quick, ferocious intelligence that moves associatively, while her fingers make languid circles in her hair. She is fine-boned and extremely upright.

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Introduction to Joan Fleming’s Song of Less

A song exists because something has been added to the world. A voice strikes out, human or angel or bird. Hands clap together, skin against skin, or move upon an instrument made from a different animal.

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CREATURELY: In Praise of New Poetry from Aotearoa

We are living in uncanny, uncertain, and uneven times. It is difficult not to feel undone by it all.

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Joan Fleming Reviews Fiona Hile and Luke Beesley

Two very recent books by two mid-career Melbourne poets offer distinct intellectual gymnasiums in which to lift and push and run and sweat. I may not have been able to master these books, but they knocked the breath out of me.

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No Safety, No Submission? A Survey of New Zealand Small Presses

There is a preconception that small presses, existing as they do outside the mainstream, publish poetry that is wilder, stranger, more political, and more ethnically diverse. Poetry that the university publishers have turned away, or whose genius such presses have failed to recognise.

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‘through worlds & worlds & worlds’: Joan Fleming interviews Jordie Albiston

I first met Albiston in a taxicab in Wellington in November of 2014. When she learned that ‘Fleming’s pool’ near her home in Altona is named after my direct ancestors, she said, ‘All right, no more conversation now.

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Dale and Fleming on as Commissioning Editors

Dale and FlemingCordite is chuffed (once again) to announce that, joining Rosalind McFarlane as Commissioning Editor, Collaborations, Amelia Dale and Joan Fleming are joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as Commissioning Editor, Experimental Literature and Commissioning Editor, New Zealand Literature respectively.

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Obligation

I am young but I have money like a grandmother. Do you remember seeing that paleface for the first time? Yes, no. Face is trying for openness, passing anti-expositional afternoons. Fieldwork is a bound time. I am designing an entrance, …

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Review Short: Lisa Jacobson’s The Asylum Poems and Judy Johnson’s Counsel for the Defence

The prettiness of the language is a curious choice, though, given the raw horror of the subject matter. Closely observed grotesque details, like the father yelling ‘Towels! ’ as he carries his bleeding brother over the threshold of their Iraqi home, are among the sequence’s most satisfying moments.

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‘We Are all Rejects’: Unsupported Writers and the New New Zealand Journal

The declining level of support offered to poets and other writers in Aotearoa/New Zealand is a source of real distress and debate for those in the writing community. Lee Posna, in an essay published last year on the Pantograph Punch, writes from the position of a poet who feels himself unsupported, and really suffers because of it.

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