Photo by Nicholas Walton-Healey

The bad news first … I am sorry to see the departure of Lisa Gorton as Cordite’s Feature Reviews Editor. Over the past 18 months, her astute eye, impeccable judgement and gracious style has produced – and leaves us with – a robust legacy of feature reviews. Gorton’s work is testament to what can happen with excellent writing from reviewers and a canny editorial acumen.

But the terrific news is that I am chuffed to announce that Bonny Cassidy will be stepping in and assuming the role as Feature Reviews Editor for Cordite Poetry Review. She is no stranger to our pages, and I have been most impressed with her work. I’m confident that she will ably fill the role – one at the very core of Cordite’s raison d’etre – with aplomb, an alchemy of wit and critical savoir-faire.

Cassidy teaches creative writing at RMIT University and is a recipient of the 2014 Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland. Her first full-length collection of poems, Certain Fathoms (Puncher & Wattmann), was published in 2012 and shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards. A new book, Final Theory, will be published by Giramondo in July 2014.

There will be a few other comings and goings throughout this year and next, and I am excited to see what the amorphous nature of an online journal such as Cordite will expand and shape up to be.

Coming up next is our special issue 46.1: MELBOURNE with its poetry, and all the rest, selected by Michael Farrell. After that, you can expect 47: COLLABORATION with poetry guest-edited by Helen Lambert and Louis Armand; 48: CONSTRAINT with Corey Wakeling; 49: OBSOLETE with Tracy Ryan; 50: TRANS-TASMAN with Bonny Cassidy and 51: NO THEME IV with John Tranter. Special issue 49.1: UMAMI with poetry selected by Luke Davies is also in the works … and damned near anything could show up for that one.

At the end of this year, Cordite 48.1: ARCORDITE – a special double issue put together by Shane Rhodes and Robyn Jeffrey at Arc Poetry Magazine in Canada and Zenobia Frost and myself at Cordite Poetry Review – will publish in print (distributed widely throughout Canada) and online.

Is it folly to schedule so far in advance? In some part, yes. Things come up, and, as Chinua Achebe notes, things fall apart. That’s okay. I cannot explicitly promise the issues will happen as I’ve just proposed (though some work on nearly all of the issues has already happened).

We … accidentally … went quarterly on the advent of 37: NO THEME with Alan Wearne, and we’ve managed to keep it going since. So here’s a big shout out to the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria and the City of Melbourne, their support is critical for the continuation of this caper.

That’s the forecast. Au revoir Lisa, and welcome Bonny – everybody now, in the French. You know the words.