GUNCOTTON
KRG Poets Award 2022
In partnership with FNAWN, we are proud to publish the winning poems from the 2022 KRG Poets Award. The award honours the life and creative work of Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert.
Submission to Cordite 106: OPEN
For OPEN, we’re interested in doublings, triplicates etcetera, and/or play and suggestion.
Submission to Cordite 107: LIMINAL
Liminal and Cordite are seeking poems by Asian Australian writers.
Submission to Cordite 105: NO THEME 11
We want poetry that is effusive and overwrought and hyperbolic and melancholic and sentimental and dark and cheesy and twisted, that pushes itself so far past the realm of good taste that it glides gleefully into ugliness.
2021 Queensland Poetry Val Vallis Award Winners
Rich in imagery that is both vividly real and subtly symbolic, ‘Cicadas’ is a lyrical meditation on mortality, transformation and sustenance.
How_to_be_the_best_worker_in_the_world.ppt
[Slide 1] You will notice all the best workers in the world purport to be fisherman[citation needed]. [Slide 2] Back when I used to drink I used to die. [Slide 3] Not to be dramatic but flies come from nowhere. …
What is Wrong With the Date?
Go ask the white historians with their shrunken heads, grumbling in their dusty cabinets, or the great collective forgetting, go ask them, spinning in their moral outrage, go lay your hand on Endeavour’s wormy beams, that brought a freight of …
Cicadas
Spring unrolled skies like runners of pink muslin, breezes steeped in honeycomb. Set out flowers in pastry blues and glacé reds; summer simmered at the season’s edge, began to smoke. That’s when I found their shells everywhere — like pods …
Submission to Cordite 104: KIN
In becoming kin, we journey unbound across homelands, histories and generations.
Submission to Cordite 102: GAME
A game is an environment navigated by apparent rules and structured by invisible rules. All of these (and the game) can be broken if you know where to look.
Submission to Cordite 101: NO THEME 10
Images courtesy of Jeanine Leane and John Kinsella. From now, and throughout 2021, we’re celebrating 25 years of publishing. Milestones include the publication of Cordite Poetry Review’s 100th issue in February, Cordite Books’ 40th print title, and the new free …
Winner and Commended Writers in the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Val Vallis Award
Helen Lucas has won the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Val Vallis Prize with ‘Heirloom’; Sarah Rice wins second prize with ‘My Time in Govie Housing Draws to a Close’ and Rae White wins the Highest Queensland entry for ‘The last …
My Time in Govie Housing Draws to a Close
Most sit out front with no front teeth but lots of heart and smokes Their cars in many stages of undress I’d showed up with mum and dad (while I still had one) and a wheel chair They’d got sick …
The last tourist
For the birds at Tangalooma, Moorgumpin (Moreton Island) White-bellied sea eagle it was a sight to sea me, bird of pray nip cormorant neck n yank clean off, blood flushing beige sand red, her wedding dress now russet as screams …
Heirloom
I My mother knitted and stitched her self into history her handwork a primary source soft proof of a life the silk nightie French seamed with an applique neckline my infant bonnet wedding dress a fancy laced bib for my …
Submission to Cordite 100: BROWNFACE
The brownface caricature of Jonah Takalua – as created and played by comedian Chris Lilley in the television show Jonah from Tonga – has been haunting Australia for twelve years.
Submission to Cordite 97: PROPAGANDA
Information can be propagated to divide or to unite. It doesn’t have to lie, it doesn’t even have to frame the truth.
Elena Gomez on as Reviews Editor
I’m honoured to announce that Elena Gomez will be taking up the helm of Reviews Editor.
Brendan Casey on as Cordite Scholarly Editor
I’m honoured to announce that Brendan Casey will be taking up the helm of Cordite Scholarly Editor. Casey is a doctoral candidate in the English and Theatre Studies program, University of Melbourne, researching Australian poetry and fiction through a postnational …
Submission to Cordite 96: NO THEME IX
No theme, no rules, except for one: send us your best poems.
2019 Val Vallis Poetry Award Winner
Damen O’Brien is the winner and the runner up to the 2019 Val Vallis Poetry Award, managed by our longtime partner, Queensland Poetry Festival.
Bezoar
Every day a beetle has its bowl of grass. Every day a nip of mouse is pursed up in the articulated ribs of an Eastern Brown. For each breaking of a Heron’s fast: a nail of Perch headfirst gulleted and …
Ice and Glass
You will be out of reach upon a wafer shelf of ice, crabbing through dreams with bent knees, while the ice snaps and smokes like a fragile simile. But this has not happened yet. You sit with me, sketching out …
