- 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 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.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Bruce Pascoe, Louise Crisp, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Marjon Mossammaparast’s That Sight
Photo by Gen Ackland. BUY YOUR COPY HERE Marjon Mossammaparast’s That Sight offers us a wide-ranging series of viewpoints, taking the reader through various locations and histories. It zooms out to cosmological heights, and even beyond to God (or the …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Lachlan Brown, Marjon Mossammaparast, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Elena Gomez’s Body of Work
There’s a difference between occupying a seemingly unceasing parade of subject positions through a kind of colonising, thieving, dissipatory borderlessness … and inhabiting them as a form of aesthetic and political revolt.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Elena Gomez, Fiona Hile, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Helen Lambert’s Echoland
Helen Lambert’s work is as new to me as it will be to others – she has been operating away from Australian poetry for some time, with long periods in Ireland and, lately, Russia. One approaches a new poet warily. Yet the inventive and capable intelligence behind the poems here is immediately apparent. It is wonderful to be able to drop one’s guard, to forget it – and to enter a wonderful world.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Helen Lambert, ken bolton, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Siobhan Hodge’s Justice for Romeo
Justice for Romeo, as a title, will seem both accurate and misleading for most readers; this is a book decidedly concerned with justice, and Siobhan Hodge’s sense of ethical responsibility pervades the poems. Hodge’s book includes as epigraph the exchange between Romeo and a servant in Act I, Scene ii of the most famous love story of all time; the servant asks, ‘I pray, can you read any thing you see?’, to which Romeo replies, ‘Ay, if I know the letters and the language.’
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Dennis Haskell, Kent MacCarter, Siobhan Hodge, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Lindsay Tuggle’s Calenture
Lindsay Tuggle’s poetry is uncomfortable to read: the discomforts one feels in reading her work are the very thing that make it memorable. At once immensely personal, ornate, and unapologetically embedded in female experience, it is a style unconcerned with irony or terseness. It is a verse informed by the still-alive alternative histories of the American South and haunted by the Southern Gothic literature that these histories inform.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Kate Middleton, Kent MacCarter, Lindsay Tuggle, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Pascalle Burton’s About the Author Is Dead
Pascalle Burton’s About the Author is Dead refers to, and opens with an epigraph from, Roland Barthes’s seminal essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Inside the collection, we find not one author but many: David Byrne and Grace Jones, Miranda July and Jacques Derrida; authors who are filmmakers, authors who are poets, philosophers and musicians.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Bella Li, Kent MacCarter, Pascalle Burton, Zoë Sadokierski
20 Poets, a Free Anthology from Cordite Books
The geographic barriers that can, at times, hinder Australian literature are no longer relevant, and poetry communities around the world must be enlightened by the commanding, demanding and exciting trajectory of contemporary Australian poetics.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Alan Loney, Anne Elvey, Autumn Royal, Bonny Cassidy, Broede Carmody, Chris Mann, Claire Nashar, derek motion, Javant Biarujia, Jeanine Leane, Jen Crawford, John Hawke, Kent MacCarter, Kris Hemensley, Matthew Hall, mez breeze, Natalie Harkin, Omar Sakr, Rachael Briggs, Ross Gibson, Tanya Thaweeskulchai, Tony Birch, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Tony Birch’s Broken Teeth
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski Don’t think you’ll get away with lightly reading these Tony Birch poems. They are not just words whistling on the wind. They come laden with other gifts. With a whole place: Melbourne. With a long …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Kent MacCarter, Stephen Muecke, Tony Birch, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Jen Crawford’s Koel
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski The koel is called after its call – its name is onomatopoeic, from the Greek ὀνοματοποιία: ‘ὄνομα’ for ‘name’ and ‘ποιέω’ for ‘I make’. The koel becomes itself as it sings out and is heard …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Divya Victor, Jen Crawford, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Autumn Royal’s She Woke & Rose
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski She Woke & Rose introduces us to a poet, Autumn Royal, who is unafraid to spark light in the darkest of places. The poems in this impressive debut collection illuminate the uneasy space of the …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Autumn Royal, Kent MacCarter, Maria Takolander, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Claire Nashar’s Lake
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski In Lake, Claire Nashar navigates the connections between people and between person and place in a striking elegy not only for her grandmother, leading geology academic Beryl Nashar, but also for Tuggerah Lake, an estuary …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged ann vickery, Claire Nashar, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Javant Biarujia’s Spelter to Pewter
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski In Javant Biarujia’s poetry, language matters – matters as in important, and matter as a unifying substance, a material to be transformed, and in so doing, becomes transforming. Particles of language are pounded out, splintered, …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Berni M Janssen, Javant Biarujia, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Rachael Briggs’s Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski The polka originated in nineteenth-century Bohemia. A dance for two, it is reputedly simple to learn. Three steps and a hop, in fast duple time, with various steps – Turning Basic, Pursuit and Waltz Galop …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Felicity Plunkett, Kent MacCarter, Rachael Briggs, Zoë Sadokierski
Cordite Books
We’re pleased to tumble out into the world these first four print collections in the new Cordite Books imprint. We had considered print collections for a few years, but the tipping point to actually publish them came in late November …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Alan Loney, John Hawke, Kent MacCarter, Natalie Harkin, Penelope Goodes, Ross Gibson, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Kent MacCarter, Natalie Harkin, peter minter, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Ross Gibson’s Stone Grown Cold
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski
The works that Ross Gibson has written and edited over the past thirty years could be classed as political aesthetics. In books like Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, chronicling the wretched historical miscreants of Queensland’s Brigalow country, or 26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788–1791, speculatively tracing English astronomer William Dawes’s scientific work and his relationship with the Indigenous Eora people of Sydney Harbour in a few late years of the eighteenth century, Ross Gibson’s method is procedural. Seven Versions and 26 Views form a compositional design that he has described as ‘fractal’, allowing unfixed multiple views and patterns. The author’s practice of creative fragmentation, applied to the poems and short prose pieces in this new collection, eschews linearity and dull chronology.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Kent MacCarter, Pam Brown, Ross Gibson, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to John Hawke’s Aurelia
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski
John Hawke’s forensic inquiries in this book are layered with casual erudition – Diderot, Czech poet Vladimir Holan – and locate the poem as transformative state. Many of these poems conclude with a mystical ascent into nature, reminiscent of Patrick White scenes in which the division between consciousness and the universe wavers, signifying that any reconciliation is epiphanic, claimed by art or religion. Yet nature belittles human effort – ‘The path to the point is marked by a scattering / of impermanent hand-made memorials’ – that is, the poet’s endeavours are precariously, though heroically, makeshift, overlaid; but nature is also that which threatens or devours, ‘digesting light’.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Gig Ryan, John Hawke, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Alan Loney’s Crankhandle
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski
Since moving from New Zealand to Australia back in 2001, Alan Loney has carried on a prolific, internationally recognised career in Melbourne. Crankhandle, Loney’s latest published work, follows on from 2014’s chapbook collaboration with Max Gimblett, eMailing flowers to Mondrian, and the books from Five Islands Press, Nowhere To Go (2007) and Fragmenta Nova (2005). Borrowing his contemporary Laurie Duggan’s term, Loney can be read as a ‘late objectivist’: worrying at that particular American formal legacy, with its attendant philosophical and ethical concerns.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Alan Loney, Kent MacCarter, michael farrell, Zoë Sadokierski
Analogue Bodies: A Conversation with Tom Lee and Zoë Sadokierski
Analogue Bodies is a collection of essays by Tom Lee, materialised as set of illustrated books by Zoë Sadokierski. The project looks at different parts of, and events within, the human body and historical ways of depicting and making sense of them. It aims to humour and, on its day, to educate. It was presented as part of the recent Emerging Writers’ Festival 2014 at the Wheeler Centre.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Sam Twyford-Moore, Tom Lee, Zoë Sadokierski
