- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with 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
Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats
BUY YOUR COPY HERE There could be no more apt place or no-place to read Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats than in an hotel room in the American Midwest, rain outside, sudden sunlight, rain resumes. Here, time feels to be …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Corey Wakeling, John Wilkinson, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Alex Creece’s Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth
Alex Creece’s Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a reckless, glorious, grotty revolution. It’s an insubordinate ‘kissyface of cobwebs’ that sticks it to capitalism, heteronormativity and the patriarchy.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Alex Creece, Rae White, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals
Zoë Sadokierski’s Father, Son and Other Animals opens with a moment of disconnection, as she describes her father’s tendency to retreat into himself when they are together, disappearing into imaginary golf practice.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged James Bradley, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Alicia Sometimes’s Stellar Atmospheres
I feel a sense of delight at the idea of an artist surreptitiously working in a science lab. There is something mischievous, rambunctious, even anarchistic about it. The idea of intervention.
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Tagged alicia sometimes, Andrea Rassell, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Ken Bolton’s A Pirate Life
The author’s playfulness is to the fore in this strange, charming book. It is a game which invites the reader to roll the dice, take a card from the deck, gain points, lose a turn, and, one way or another, advance around a notional game board: a pirate’s world of exotic ports, risky encounters, escapades, wonders and the routine of shipboard life, always in the presence of the moody, changeable sea.
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Tagged ken bolton, Nicholas Jose, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Dan Hogan’s Secret Third Thing
What characterises Dan Hogan’s poetry is the way that, each time we come close to fully apprehending the impending collapse of capitalism, we are waylaid by something more urgent and mundane: groceries, emails, calls to Centrelink, traffic jams on the way home from work.
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Tagged Dan Hogan, Eda Gunaydin, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to A J Carruthers’s AXIS Z Book 3
In a j carruthers’s new collection, verse stanzas, running vertically from top to bottom rather than left to right, challenge the dominant linear mode of thinking and writing in the West.
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Tagged A J Carruthers, Wang Guanglin, Zoë Sadokierski
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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Tagged Harry Reid, Melinda Bufton, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Alison Flett’s Where We Are
Conditional responses to the poems seem not only possible, but necessary. There’s much that slips in and out of light, and Flett’s poems have a zero-sum gaze: where there’s not light, there’s darkness.
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Tagged Alison Flett, Duncan McLean, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Kim Cheng Boey’s The Singer and Other Poems
BUY YOUR COPY HERE In this work of a mature artist, Kim Cheng Boey’s characteristic style – literary, allusive, memoirist, with a flâneur’s sensibility – is on full display. The book’s triptych staging – ‘Little India Dreaming’, ‘The Middle Distance’ …
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Tagged Kim Cheng Boey, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Zoë Sadokierski
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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Tagged Anwen Crawford, Joan Fleming, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Teena McCarthy’s Bush Mary
When Teena McCarthy told me she had constructed this book from poems, lines, phrases and images that she had written on odd-sized pieces of paper and had gathered them until they formed a manuscript, I immediately thought of Emily Dickinson, who also wrote many of her poems on the backs of envelopes and scraps that had been used as shopping lists.
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Tagged robert adamson, Teena McCarthy, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Alex Selenitsch’s Look!
BUY YOUR COPY HERE To situate the work contained in Look!, it is worth recalling the rich but neglected Concrete Poetry tradition. Even in the twenty-first century, its challenge to the transparency of the word as a medium of communication …
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Tagged Alex Selenitsch, DJ Huppatz, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Catherine Vidler’s Wings
BUY YOUR COPY HERE Catherine Vidler’s Wings are in your hands: here’s 66 of them from a series of 100. At the beginning of this book is a black-and-white image of what appears to be an insect with six, or …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Amelia Dale, Catherine Vidler, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Ella O’Keefe’s Slowlier
Since 1972, satellites have circled the earth, collecting images of it and sending them back to be catalogued and examined. Conventionally these satellites are called landsats, sometimes EarthHawks.
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Tagged Ella O'Keefe, Juliana Spahr, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Lucy Van’s The Open
All doors are open in Lucy Van’s poetry. Ingress and egress are multiple, even coincident. We’ve just touched what’s here, or are about to touch it, when apprehension is quickly unsettled, halted or reconfigured.
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Tagged Lucy Van, Merlinda Bobis, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Em König’s Breathing Plural
Will we miss nature, asks Em König in Breathing Plural? In ‘dreams of stale breath’, maybe. Or ‘in another life, on another planet … maybe’ (echoing The Only Ones’ only hit). Glenn Albrecht says in Earth Emotions, ‘It [nature] effectively no longer exists’.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Em König, Jill Jones, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries
I’ve noticed that Prithvi Varatharajan thinks carefully about offering a true gesture, word or position in every social exchange. I sense that, for him, all communication is an art defined by authenticity rather than decadence. His reflective nature is continuous with the character of the poetics in Entries.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, Prithvi Varatharajan, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to John Mukky Burke’s Late Murrumbidgee Poems
John Mukky Burke – one of my favourite philosophers – is the most underrated poet in Australia. His usual lacerating intelligence and empathy are here in this sensational collection, but ‘exuberance’ is the word that keeps occurring to me as I read. Burke is a poet who, in maturity, has shed many masks and is the better for it.
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Tagged John Mukky Burke, Melissa Lucashenko, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Astrid Lorange’s Labour and Other Poems
This book is titled Labour and Other Poems. Just as Astrid Lorange speaks of building a poetics – intensive and intentional – as a way of perceiving the world of relations in their shadow, every poem here requests an attentiveness to the multiple relations of our lives, to the entwining of senses and references.
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Tagged Astrid Lorange, Justin Clemens, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Caren Florance’s Lost in Case
BUY YOUR COPY HERE Caren Florance works in the Venn overlaps of text art, visual poetry and creative publishing. Her work is hard to pin down, principally because the artist herself is not interested in a static outcome. Much of …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Angela Gardner, Caren Florance, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition
BUY YOUR COPY HERE Philosophical questions of reality and duality underpin many of the poems in Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition, leading to a sense of rebuilding and remembrance in the aftermath of abodes. The potency of houses is a …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Keri Glastonbury, Zenobia Frost, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu
Since Charmaine Papertalk Green’s poetry was first published in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets in 1986, her voice on the page has been consistent: eloquently powerful, respectfully challenging and true to her role in life as a Yamaji Nyarlu.
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Tagged Anita Heiss, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Louise Crisp’s Yuiquimbiang
Read. This is poetry. Both a praise and a lament for Country. Read. There is little like it. Australia struggles with an embrace of the past, but Louise Crisp does not flinch from the intimacy of fact.
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Tagged Bruce Pascoe, Louise Crisp, Zoë Sadokierski