Cordite 41.1 Special Issue: Ratbaggery Editorial by Duncan Hose

"Like all designations of high hermeneutic mystery, the phrase ‘Ratbag Poetry’ requires a personal archaeology. I needed to know what a Ratbag Poem could be – poems that are vituperative, poems that are a nuisance. I call upon Byron’s distaste for Keats’ propensity for frigging with his imagination, which seems to us a virtue, and counts as a measure of the bile produced when a Ratbag is, in their turn, Ratbagged. It is partly the wickedness of your type and partly the quality of your infection; the spleen is actually the Romantic organ."

Essays: Notes on Ratbaggery by DJ Huppatz, A Poetics of the Naughty by Tom Lee and Ratbag's Polemic by Astrid Lorange

Ekphrasis: Small to Medium Enterprise by Garry Pumfrey and Ross Gibson

"Drive a thousand miles at breakneck, at least until your nerve folds. Act like there’s a bullet in a soft cyst and its floating near your spleen. Sketch a heat-map of the gone souls. Call it 'empty'. Call it 'open'?"

Film: Film of Sound by Hazel Smith, Will Luers and Roger Dean

"A sleeping man, an evening in a hotel room, and a journey across vast and challenging spaces. But the incipient narrative constantly breaks down into disordered memories of violence and repression, undefined threats, splintered subjectivities, glitches and raw data."

Review: Kate Lilley's Ladylike

Poetry: