CONTRIBUTORS

Melinda Bufton

Melinda Bufton is the author of Girlery and Superette. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including anthologies Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016) and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016). In 2019, she was the winner of the Charles Rischbieth Jury Poetry Prize as well as the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award, the latter resulting in the publication of her third collection, Moxie (2020).

BABY DOLL PYJAMAS

to even up the more stoic exactitudes – If that is your intent – arcing up the atmos with a little ambient fizz can be the solution. Would you put on a baby doll pyjama? It’s very cute of coarse …

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Introduction to Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone

BUY YOUR COPY HERE In Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone, we enter a nondescript door down a laneway, casually apply the secret knock, and the door slides open – just enough for us to squeeze through sideways before it shuts …

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Melinda Bufton Reviews Ursula Robinson-Shaw’s Noonday

Noonday is an intriguingly built set of poems. As a reader, I am looking to be jolted into a new paradigm. I want the poet to raise the stakes and am generally looking for puzzles I cannot solve.

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‘That is some crafty bite’: Trisha Pender Interviews Melinda Bufton

In her eagerly awaited second collection, Superette (Puncher & Wattman, 2018), Melinda Bufton delivers dramatically on the promise announced in her 2014 debut, Girlery (Inken Publisch, 2014).

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The Possible Dream (Buying Jeans Online)

I don’t know. Does Eileen Myles think this much about her jeans? Probably not. Creating the perfect poetry jeans is not as hard as you think. It requires patience, skill, habitat and armoury. How to be Parisian seems to be …

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Review Short: Nathanael O’Reilly’s Distance

Nathanael O’Reilly’s Distance is threaded with daily objects and locations pressed carefully against each other for maximum coverage within minimum space. O’Reilly’s poems can travel whole countries in a couple of phrases, or emotional landscapes that dart from comfort to the homesickness we glimpse via the sparse beats charged with its evocation.

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Tastemaker Allowables

(15 signs I’ve become middle class) I don’t save anything for good a. I don’t save anything for bad Mind the poorhouse, cantilever side split 60 slow on the know how Berate with the swordfish mouth/kisser Orchestrate Take them down …

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Review Short: Melinda Smith’s Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call

Melinda Smith’s Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call is her fourth collection, her work including substantial anthologisation and a number of prizes. Smith’s self-described aim is to for her poetry to ‘educate, inform and entertain … but mostly entertain’ (being the subtitle of her blog, Melinda Smith’s Mull and Fiddle).

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Continental Hourglass

3pm French service at the church of OMG dear secret vision board I have Franco’d up my stays into pearl restraint There are no zips as zips untrusted And you, my friend, with your hitherto plans your golden irises to …

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Review Short: Warwick Anderson’s Hard Cases, Brief Lives

The manner in which poets divide their lives is of enduring, perhaps obsessive, interest to me. More specifically, I’m interested in what they choose to reveal or emphasise, and what they let slide to the background of their visible identity.

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Review Short: Jo Langdon’s Snowline

It can be argued that one way to begin to make your ‘mark’ is to settle on a theme; in marketing, it’s a handle or a simple angle. In creative realms, it can be an oeuvre or a period, with a descriptor. Ideally, it should never be held too close to its object/subject for fear of typecasting, but for an emergent poet, it may well be the thing that reassures readers and helps them with a doorway into your work. For a first chapbook, a theme can also be the way to find publication. Jo Langdon’s Snowline is the 2011 winner of the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, a welcome initiative for emerging poets from the Geelong-based Whitmore Press. It’s a deserving winner, and a pleasure to experience.

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Ellipsis Getting Bigger

Me: Yeah, no, I write too … Person: Really, great! What do you write? Me: Poetry Person: ‘…’ Sometimes that person actually lowers their eyes, bows their head, as though I have somehow reached too far into their minds and …

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