Our PEACH edition is named in memory of Blair Peach, a teacher from New Zealand who was killed by a member of the Special Patrol Group, Metropolitan Police, while protesting a racist gathering of the National Front in the immigrant suburb of Southall, Middlesex (UK) in April 1979.The memory is bitter: reports acknowledging the cause of death were only made public by the Metropolitan Police in 2010, and no person has ever been brought to justice for this crime.

In writing PEACH we remember the gentleness and dedication of an ordinary man taking a stand against oppression; the legacy of anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist solidarity that continues to resonate in popular memory; and the inspiration for the work of poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Reggae fi Peach’) and Bhanu Kapil (Ban en banlieue).

PEACH is an abundantly poetic word, connoting border-crossing – peach is derived from the Latin, persicum malum, the Persian apple – and transgression: did Prufrock dare to eat a 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. PEACH, a synecdoche for struggle, a poetics of vitality and subversion prone to bruising, is your invitation to engage with the planetary solidarities expressed by the memory of Blair Peach. We welcome text and sound poetry, as well as microfiction, that complicates and enriches the poetics of resistance.

Submit poems (prose, comics, visual, concrete) or works of micro-fiction (500 words maximum). Read more about submitting to Cordite Poetry Review. Please note:

1. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.

2. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor will anonymously select an additional 30-35 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works. For each issue, the guest editor does not know the identities of the online contributors (via Submittable) until after the final selections have been made.

3. Simultaneous submissions or previously published material will not be considered. This includes works published in print and web journals but does not apply to material first published on personal blogs.

4. Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.

5. We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.

6. Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …