GUNCOTTON
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 …
Submission to Cordite 94: EARTH
Why EARTH? Because we are of it, because we are destroying it, because there is nowhere else.
Submission to Cordite 93: PEACH
A ripe peach may seem the embodiment of the good life, but in this issue, PEACH also stands for the bitterness of brutality as well as the richness of resistance.
Submission to Cordite 92: NO THEME VIII
I’m looking for work ‘with head, heart and guts,’ as Bei Dao says.
Bella Li on as Associate Publisher
I’m honoured to announce that Bella Li will be joining Cordite Books as Associate Publisher. There is much activity with the books, and her masterful eye, publishing nous, and creativity will be a welcome and necessary addition.
Alex Creece on as Production Editor
I’m honoured to announce that Alex Creece is joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as Production Editor, joining us from her time in the Cordite / Monash University Summer Term Internship Program.
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Submission to Cordite 91: MONSTER
Kanye West said it himself – everybody knows – then Nicki Minaj out-rapped him … then Nicki Minaj vs Cardi B. Give me monster feuds and battles. Give me Conor McGregor attacking a bus. Give me monsters in the Oval …
Reality On-demand
1. Demo Day Jo Gaines walks right into me and takes stock. Good bones, y’all – I love this one. So much potential. Knuckle through a wall or two and fill me up with light, hem back the big trees …
What We Know About Her
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance – Thomas Jefferson What we know about her is what she gives us freely of her own will, one click wrap privacy policy at a time, swiping across the slate of her life. …
Winners for the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem 2018
Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2018 Selection panel: Alison Whittaker and Angela Gardner.
Submission to Cordite 89: DOMESTIC
I invite you to lean into this DOMESTIC sphere in all its homely undoing. Use words like beautiful bait to seduce hearts with razor-sharp decolonising intent and rupture the masquerading shape of cosy bliss, as only a poem can.
Varatharajan on as Commissioning Editor
Cordite is chuffed (once again) to announce that, joining Rosalind McFarlane, Amelia Dale and Joan Fleming as commissioning editors, Prithvi Varatharajan is joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as commissioning editor for media poetry.
Submission to Cordite 87: DIFFICULT
Poetry for Cordite 87: DIFFICULT is guest-edited by Oscar Schwartz and Holly Isemonger. Says Holly: Poems can be spiky, sassy, cutting and frustrating – difficulty is built into how we perceive them. Probably as a result of schooling – a …
Submission to Cordite 86: NO THEME VII
This project is supported by the City of Melbourne 2018 Annual Arts Grants Program.
Dale and Fleming on as Commissioning Editors
Cordite is chuffed (once again) to announce that, joining Rosalind McFarlane as Commissioning Editor, Collaborations, Amelia Dale and Joan Fleming are joining the Cordite Poetry Review fold as Commissioning Editor, Experimental Literature and Commissioning Editor, New Zealand Literature respectively.
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.
Buying Satin Dresses at Yu Garden
I buy them like fruit, my body still on the bike, one foot grounded. This one like a wedge of lime on my lip. Idiot machines clench these colours together in some grainy province, craft ravelled down to whatever thread’s …












TRANSQUEER is a call for you to say something that maybe you haven’t been able to say before. It asks you to find poetry in / between lines, binaries and stultifying categorisations; from the life of flesh, from inside the bleating, many-chambered heart of gender and sexuality.