ESSAYS
Portrait, Lyric, Code: Reading the Face Before and After Laura Riding Jackson’s Body’s Head
A young woman sits partially side-on. Her right hand is wrapped lightly around her left wrist.
She wears no necklace, no rings. She sits against a blue sky.
NO THEME XI Editorial
A lot happened over the months we spent working on this issue, from November when we published our playful, hyperactive call-out, to now, the beginning of winter, a date that marks a shift in the year’s trajectory. It’s time to …
On Kinds of Aunts, Dorothy Porter’s Barbaroi and the Head of a Gorgon
My youngest aunt, Irene, has a dream which she recounts to me, one unremarkable morning, when I am reading to my father over the phone.
KIN Editorial
KIN explores how kinship, our understandings of who we are and where we come from, engages with dynamic senses of Country and belonging to Country.
Stand-up Comedy: A Scene of Paradoxes
After one year, 80 gigs and countless nights worrying, I finally told my parents I did stand-up comedy.
House Style Lifestyle, Or: Same. Same. Same. Same. Same. Same.
Image by Lauren Connelly. 3920 words. 22-minute read. Welcome to the world of snackable content. Listen closely: like an ambient soundscape, its soft tides wash over you and you devour it quickly. Sometimes, it repeats an opinion you’ve already developed, …
On the Holding of Spaces for Essaying Into
It’s a putting oneself into a space of deliberate uncertainty. Stepping into the unknown. A practicing in that space. Training.
‘Seeking to be here, doing this’: Po-Essaying into Agro-ecological Thinking
I don’t eat pork. Dislike its taste and texture. Perhaps this is because my mother is a terrible cook, her meats always tough and dry.
AMBLE Editorial
The uneasy and subjective (this is an accurate phrase, so I’m borrowing it) process of selecting poems felt more heightened in this process because of the solitude.
Erasure Poetry As Outsourcing the Lexicon with Reference to Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager and M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
Certainly one of the most radical works of erasure poetry is Zong! (Wesleyan, 2008) by M NourbeSe Philip. Where many other examples choose an ample text to move through in linear fashion, producing enough material in the process to constitute the project in its entirety, Philip instead reacts to an extreme paucity of information.
Fair Trade: a way to RE/order /imagine /code the world
It was August 2017 and the location was The Tibetan Kitchen on Brunswick Street in Meanjin, Brisbane.
Just Mediation: Videogames, Reading and Learning
The inclination, first, and then the capability, of schooled literacy in its institutional framing – most prominently the study of literature – to integrate videogames into its terms of reference has been of interest to us for over a decade.
The Stakes of Settlement: Fences in Ned Kelly and Michael Farrell
Signalling possession, privatisation, and productivity, the fence was one of the main props by which a cadastral grid (comprised of adjoining rectangular land parcels) was imposed on the Australian landscape.
Arts of the Possible: Time, Politics and Gaming’s Virtual Worlds
The relation of digital games to narrative and storytelling has been the subject of considerable back-and-forth among academics, who sometimes seek to draw hard lines between putatively linear media such as novels, film or TV, and the multilinear structures of digital games.
Instapoetry: The Anxiety of the Influencer
On Instagram, old questions about sincerity and identity in the lyric voice meet new pressures from the digital attention economy. This collision has produced evolutions in form, but also prompted critical questions about the Instapoem’s commodification of selfhood and about …
Simulative Pleasure: The Game of Reading in English Education
A state of bliss requires an openness to uncertainty. And why not learn all this with love?
GAME Editorial
As we write this, we are living in cities that are both in lockdown. Our days see us bouncing from one device to another, room to room to room.
Exoskeletonism: Writing Poetry about the Films of Akira Kurosawa
These lines are from a second poem of mine about the image of the actor Toshiro Mifune in the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon (1950), a follow-up to my poem ‘The Bandit Without Mifune’, which refers to an autonomous image of the bandit character waking in the oil of the celluloid – a much better line than those above, I know.
Weaving Blankets of Story and Hearts of Gold: An Archival-poetics Praxis
My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer on his fifty-ninth birthday and after a fierce battle with his body and mind, he died two years later. In the face of all odds, he maintained optimism and hope.
NO THEME 10 Editorial
A callout for a poetry of consciousness ‘that enacts and is responsible for what it considers’, that has been written with an awareness of ‘crises, brinks and redress’, was always going to bring some powerful and confronting work.
BROWNFACE editorial
I was 12 and in Year 7 when Chris Lilley’s mockumentary Summer Heights High aired on ABC for the first time.
A Mouth Saying Stroh-beh-ree
For reasons sufficient to the writer, as ‘Papa’ would say, certain places, people and words have been left out of these notes. Some are secret and some are known by everyone.
In Black and White: Pictures from the Camera Obscura
I’ve been trying to train myself out of black. It’s not going well – on the rack my eye still heads that way every time. I know in theory that some colour would suit me better but I seem to be shut in the dark.
SINGAPORE Editorial
We consciously eschewed the substantial but well-represented body of Singaporean poetry originally written in English, and instead sought out voices from Tamil, Malay, Chinese and more which have not been as well circulated in the anglophone literary world.
