Conversation with a Decommissioned Electric Chair

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Samuel Wagan Watson

Circa September, 2015
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

I first admired your arms, brown and unrefined like mine, the scars and veins unhidden.     Straight back. Strong neck.     An inanimate object that would never be caught slouching.     I pay acknowledgement: you were always professional and executed your charge efficiently…
in the end.
But what say you of right or wrong? Guilty or not guilty? That you know that I know that hardwood is a memory-medium. The acoustic resonance of a final whimper and breath may haunt your joints, limbs, and possibly persuade a vibration of inconsequential requiem…
in the end.
In the servitude and the conditioning, the extreme prejudice, the fact that no one except the killer and the victim know the truth…Does a confessional simmer into your timbers on the last moments of your charge’s rapture?     If the crimes fit the punishment, you only respond one way anyway and know not reverse, even for the slightest mitre of compassion.     And is any of it relevant in the final seating arrangements of judges and assassins and lambs…leaving one to ask this of
a decommissioned electric chair…
in the end.

“If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be punishment-as well as the prison.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.

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Marrickville

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Louise Carter

It’s been three weeks since I cleaned the bathroom
and it hasn’t been cleaned since. But that’s what you get
in a share house – a glorified squat for people
who don’t want to pay full rent but dress it up
as ‘community minded’ – a place where conversations
about the fairest division of the gas bill take place
over the compost bin. You could say, hopeful of heart,
that it’s a family, which it is – dysfunctional –
the air seething with PMT, all of us rolling
out yoga mats to the sound of the kettle boiling,
the fridge stocked with kale and coconut water
but never meat. We’re a generation of ideological orphans
building Zion in Marrickville, our dyed hair a symbol
of our kinship – while the original residents, the old-school
Greek immigrants, gaze bewildered from their porches
as hordes of us jog past them of a morning,
farting smugness. I’m so far from home,
from the buzz-cut lawns and yipping dogs, from kitchens
with microwaves and African violets softly dying
beside disinfected sinks. These days I take comfort
in YouTube and weed on nights where the urge
to give up on this poetry caper becomes overwhelming –
the fear that there’s nothing you can do to avoid
becoming your mother so you might as well swallow
your insolence, move back to the suburbs and give birth
in front of the TV. These days I force my focus
onto whatever the present moment happens to reveal –
organic toothpaste, bowls caked with chia seeds,
my own face glimpsed in the mirror like seeing
a celebrity in a cafe – the intimate recognition
of a stranger in this, the mediocre immediate.

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Mollusc

Posted on May 4, 2016 by David Morris

She sat up from the pillows crossed against the bedhead, her back straight, eyes locked on me. How did I think she felt? I spent every night in my study. I never wanted to talk. I hadn’t touched her in weeks. Couldn’t I see she was hurting? I stood in the doorway, looking at the white bed sheet she was gathering up into her fists. Then, she started crying. She called herself an idiot. Idiot, idiot, idiot. Suddenly, she punched herself in the face. And again. She cried she was a fool for loving me. I had no blood in me. I was a mollusc.

I didn’t argue.

Even as I tried to say calming things, tell her we’d work it out, I looked at the drywall behind her, thought how thin it was, and that our neighbours could hear every word.

When I was a child, my bedroom was opposite my parent’s room, just a few feet of hallway between us. I’d hear my mother at night, whimpering, “No” and “Please”. I knew it was for my sake she stifled her voice, and it wasn’t much louder than a whisper. I’d hear my father grunting.

I want to believe there was a time when I wrapped a pillow around my head and pressed it hard against my ears. All I remember are the years I searched for faces and objects in the moonlit water stains on the ceiling, waiting for him to finish and later, falling asleep before he had.

I wish I hadn’t said anything about that. The part about my mother and father, that is. I want to stop making that a part of the story.

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Hey Preacher.

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Charlotte Guest
Be groovy or leave, man. Bob Dylan in the speakers, holding my hand and God’s. I took my velvet coat and slithered into the night. They called me The Confidence Man. I started the car. The machine stroked the road as we glided through the city. Every night until 2:00am, dropping angels off at bars. Time was a physical thing then, a thing with three dimensions that stretched on and on like my mother talking. I remember when I took the job, when it occurred to me. I remember thrashing around to Hendrix, watching people look at art. I remember ascending the stairs to his gallery feeling like something was about to happen. There was an atmosphere of brink. He had the fever. He was cold and sweating. I took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. We hummed together, singing the moment, and then we were silent. You’ve got a cowboy’s mouth, I said. He smiled, and you’ve got the eyes of a preacher.


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Astronomical Twilight

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Gig Ryan

In a dress, in a dream
your guide points out carvings, a well to kick.
Sissy mountains slope to ground.
His fans bay in the church of Perpetual Succour.
Plane to the apron,
a rook abed, to swindle and jack.

Walk into sky when the street ends, to turbid night.
Traffic dinks around a tower.
She rotates in her garden.
The spying dog returns, flummoxed.

What a relief, her promenade or whatnot
but still the shouting,
and languor overtakes both like a victim,
his velvety daub in the ashtray,
the sewn mouths in the islands.
Parliament resumes, on a corpse.
Each path, addled and peremptory, calls
in bossed waves.

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Focus Pulling

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Shane Strange

In the economy of flesh, shame has no
tender— it is the first thing to go

And, you know, self-flagellation, if done
correctly, provides a gravity to which loose
bodies accrue. So, the calculation

arrives unbidden—a balance of junky
cunning: first make ‘em weep, then
see what’s in it for you.

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Horse Preamble

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Ania Walwicz

Dear reader. I will tell you a story. This is a story of my life now. Dear reader turn away from these pages…They will only bring grief to me… It will only wound me and hurt me. But I must do it now. lch muss… Inner necessity. I have to do it now. I must.I have to. I have to do it now and do do do a doo doo … lt is imperative. I have to. This is something I have to do to save me. Dear reader, I’m in bits and pieces. I am a broken house. I am a puzzle. I have to place this together. This will glue me and repair me. This will build me. Buildingsroman. A constructive novel. A book. This is the theatre of my head in a theatre. I act this out. I enact me. I act out. I act up. I work this out. I am actor enactor of the inner theatre of Anna 0. This is the theatre of my head. I am my performance now. I become somebody else. I want to become somebody else who is me. I am a she looking for me. Somebody help me. Help me. I help me. I talk to me when nobody else… I talk when I can’t talk. I speak here where there is no speech or speaker. This is a page and a tape. This will be done and done with. This is the theatre in a theatre. I act my body now. I feel my finger tips when I cannot feel my finger. This will stop a dam from burst asunder. This will•keep a dyke from flood. I’m little Dutch boy. I keep the world, together. By doing this, just by doing this, just by this, exactly. I intend to travel back and travel forward. I aim high. I plan to fly and fly. I am making this up and this makes me into into somebody. I become my story. I put on costumes in my, the theatre of my head. A performative text and a performance now. I am speaking in your head. I put on a fur cap and red boots now. I act up. This is a play in a play. I enter a narrative, a fragmented narrative. I cut me up. Rumplestitskin. I tear myself in half when somebody knows my name, but nobody knows me now and I don’t know me. But I will know me. I aim to. I want to.I plan to. I will start with a little child. I will start with Swidnica, a little town. I will go back to that and I will travel. This will take me where it will take me. I am ready.! enter a little theatre now with red curtains. I wear a red dress now. I have a horse. I wear a crown I wear. Who am I now. I will talk this out, work it now. I am making, I intend to make a person in a person. A subject in process, in progress…! am on my way. This is making me different. This does me an Ania. This my record and recording. I hear me now. Oral, aural text. I will act this out now. I ride a horse, horsey, hobby horse, dada. It rolls now. Unroll red carpets now. Lights and action starts. I feel lively, lovely, beloved, heavenly. God help me now. Light me, bright me. Speak through me.l am spoken now. Words tell me and say me and make me into me.l please me.Other writers speak through me now. I am a fictocritical construct, a machine for writing. I am made of this, only this.I make this. This grows me and grows and grows and makes itself in me.l am the beanstalk and jack and jack in a box now.I open my lid and laugh now.l will see where this will take me. It will take me where it will take me. It will make me famous and different to me. It will transform me. I will make a story and a theatre.! will travel far and further.I feel better and better.I can cry now.

Hinda Rosen, my student in the poetry class brings a book for me .”Konik Garbusek”, a fairytale “Konyok Garbunok”, written by Piotr Jerszow ,a Russian scholteacher. This is my first year prize from my primary school in Swidnica Slaska, school number 7. I remember the school number embossed in white on a navy blue shield, sewn onto my coat. And the blue beret that I now wear. With a bow.

What does this mean to me what does horse mean to me it hurts me it hurts me i remember me school now and blue navy blue uniform now overall with buttons on fartuszek with white collar on you have to iron this i have to find this out i have to know what i mean now I have to work this out rebus puzzle story of my life now what is it it’s all in my book now all here my diary dream diary my analysis now with franca simone shanti belinda Jacqueline and naomi now i learn how to cry I have to try and try to know me and i don’t know me no i don’t know me

I meet Hinda at the age of 11 at Elwood Central School by the seaside in Melbourne in 1963. I tell her I want to be a writer. Autor. Writer here. Exactly where I am. The Polish ambassador contacts me in 2011, Andrzej Jaroszewski. He wants to meet me and he meets me in 2012. He edits books of poetry­ about war. l am introduced to him by lzabela Rajtaczak who becomes my friend and sends me the current print of the “Konik Garbusek” book, Oficyna Wydawnicza, Poznan, smaller now and translated into prose but with the very same illustrations by Jan Szancer. I receive the book in 2013. The original imprint of my book is 1957, in the lost world now.

The book becomes my symbolic field of reading the self, of reading myself, of projection, introjection, play of symbolic meanings and the sense ofthe puzzle appears. Something needs to be deciphered or made clear. I have a stone in my shoe I need to take out now. This has to be done. I have to do this. I want to do this now. This is the doing. I am doing this is doing me and writing me now. Writing as a memory and imprint ofthe self. This is my diary. This my dream diary. I analyse me.

“Konik Garbusek” translates into “Humpback Pony”, the pony is the helper, the assistant, the magical force in the story. I am the humpback pony. At the age of six my back is bent, one shoulder higher than the other. The self is split and exists within the fissure of the underdog Ivan, the protagonist, the Konik who helps him and the elements of the story, a journey. I write a fairytale at the age of six, called “Sopel Zlosci” – “Icicle of Anger” about a king who is ill and a magician travels and performas magical acts so that the king can recover. I never finish the story. I abandon it and I take it up here. l abandon me and take it up here. The anger is frozen but I unfreeze me. I come alive now. I feel good. I feel my life now.

pony humback pony hunchback me I am humback pony help me god help me help me somebody help me oh help me help help me help me Rhonda help me guardian angel with wings help me over a dark water now ober over over little bridge guardian angel with wings aniele bozy strozu moj angel help me now over water river I can’t swim now in deep dark forest now in deep dark night in deep dark now I am pony girl now i enter my picture get into me now associate and disassociate now i attach me here i sew me in i sew me in by magic now I was torn in pieces and sew me together to put it how to put

Fictocriticism; a practice that sews me that I sew here. Bricolage, montage, assemblage, collage, caller, to stick together. I make a story out of bits and pieces. The process of associative thought and reflection. Improvisation and analysis. The flight of thought, a trajectory and reflection, retrieval, recoil. The use of multilevel text comprising poetics, theory and appropriated text. The entry into my fairytale here.

Define fictocriticism, define a horse. Fictocriticism tells a story through a story, tells a story indirectly, alludes to a story, tells my story differently, represents me, presents me with a symbol, a remnant, a rebus, a puzzle, a shadow a dream that has to be decoded.Amanda Nettlebeck writes in “The Space

Between- Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism”:”the voice and the book dissolve into a plethora of half complete” texts”, voices, incommensurable “positions”. Between the two moments-a world of difference”.

I dream that Margaret Trail, my reader is my mother and that Leonardo di Caprio who plays Arthur Rimbaud in “Total Eclipse” is both my brother and my father. He is drunk and writes “The Drunken Boat” here. We live in the flat in St. Kilda. l write my dreams down now. Margaret Trail becomes the “good enough mother” of Winnecott who “meets the omnipotence of the infant ( me} and makes sense of it”. lanalyse my dream now. l analyse me. I am the director of my theatre! am Arthur Rimbaud who is drunk now.

I go back now I go back now oh I go back now … i cry and cry and cry and cry now or i pretend to cry here boohoo boohoo I tell jess that I worry and worry but now I don’t worry but I worry I scare me

Sigmund Freud writes an essay on the uncanny, unheimlich, the unhomely, the weird, that which makes my hair stand up. The pony book reminds me and reminds me … One thing echoes and duplicates another and doubles and trebles and multiplies me. This scares me. Freud becomes terrified by his reflection in the mirror of the train, a sleeper, wagon lit, when the mirrored door swings open, all of a sudden he sees a stranger, a gentleman in a dressingown and a sleeping hat of a sleeper who invades his cabin. The self and its reflection. The self and its double. That other in the mirror. I am scared of the book that is brought to me in the poetry class now. I read it and re-read it.

Freud writes …”the uncanny is that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar…We are reminded that the word Heimlich is not unambiguous but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight”. *(“Imago”, BD.V.,1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Funfe Folge.( translated by Alix Strachey}

return to child me return a come back to me where at six it comes back a me a feel how i this feel to m,e what ida did what happen to me what did what where where where am inow back a me where

aniusia tak ja jestem biedna i chora, nie, jestem bogata i zdrowa jestem zywa jeszcze zywa tutaj tu ja wiem jak czytac teraz wiem jak pisac wiem jak teraz wiem jak

Anna Gibbs writes” … a selection of psychoanalytic writings to explore what theoretical writing on intertextuality so often occludes: that is the passionate dimension of intertextual practices … literary borrowings, influences, apprenticeships, and hauntings- by other writers, by the music of words, by memories …”fiction theoretique”… called “fictocriticism”… hybrid forms of writing which mix genres,eschew omniscient modes of narration and “grand narratives” in favour of first-person or multiple partial perspectives … singular stories and fragmented forms”.*( Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 18, No. 42, 2003}

Ania Walwicz writes-” I always have to quote somebody. This is a form of gossip now. So-and -so said. That’s the way to write about. The discourse, the formation of a discourse. That is what I am learning

now. What somebody said and the interaction with that. That somebody says me now. Or I say that, I say that. I say what I think now. What I think about.” *(Meanjin Voi.S6,1996)

When one reads one’s writing one becomes another person and another person. I am Luce lrigaray, Monique Wittig, Helene Cixous, Piotr Jerszow and me when I was six years old. Reading and re­ reading the self or what one thinks and feels the self is or was. Janet Frame writes- I don’t know if it had happened to me or is happening or will happen to me in the future.

Freud writes about screen memory. We recollect an outline, a shadowy construct, a fragment and then fill that in, colour it in. The pony book is the instigator, the trigger, the commencement and then beginner. I free- associate now. Teresa D’Avila writes about the smell of flowers, the olfactory event when I smell the smell of roses, dusty pink smell of roses while I read my words. I begin a voyage, an adventure here. I improvise and construct this as I go along. I don’t know where this will take me. Yet I feel my way and know that the story, the true story of my life, the real autobiography …

i am little horse pony konik garbusek little hump back pony now am mister ed dead dad mister deedee said i get in me iget out of me and I get in me I enter little door now in palace of ants i am king here I am king of my heart

Marguerite Duras says that the story of life does not exist. I am made from bits and pieces. Glimpses.The Kaballah states that awareness, awareness of the divine, the Shekinah, appears in glimpses, little glimpses, shards. Zohar, the book of splendour, writes that all will be reversed, all that stands up will lie down, all that upside will stand on its head, all will be transformed, transferred, altered. Words will alter me, words will, by writing this by saying this

god help me assist me gold help me now angels of angels hold me up arms gold help me assist me

The horse book tells me a story. Three brothers live with their father and grow wheat. The eldest are strong and cunning but the youngest Ivan, Vanya ( Ania) is stupid now. He sleeps above a stove, on top of the stove in winter. Somebody steals wheat now. They set up a watch. Big brothers fall asleep. But Ivan, Vanya (Ania) stays up and sees a white mare, a big horse now, golden mane who frolicks and gallops. He leaps and won’t let her go now. No, never ever. She speaks to him and makes a bargain. She will give him two beautiful, fine horses, and a magic pony, in return for her freedom. He can sell the horses but the little hump back pony must stay with him, always. He agrees to this. He lets her go. The horses arrive next morning, with the pony. Evil brothers steal the horses and sell them. Evil sister steals my horses away. I am Ivan now (the focus of identification). I am the hurt party, the underdog. They steal me and steal from me. But I keep the pony, the magic pony- konik garbusek, with two humps on me. Ivan finds this out. I find this out now. I find me out. Brothers sell horses, lovely black horses with silver manes and plaits and shiny hoofs from pearls. The Russian tsar buys them for his stable. The best horses. He hires me to look after him. I am the stableboy, groom, at the centre of the story. I act it out on me, in me.

Psychodrama, the theatre proposed as a psychological carthasis, a release of conflict, an externalisation of repressed areas in the psyche, the theatre where all elements of the narrative become movable

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I placed a sprig of rosemary at your feet

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Broede Carmody

Grief is finding bits of Tim Tams in your bed
even though you haven’t slept there for two days.
I want to move to a place where they will laugh at my dingo accent.
Pine needles pressed to cold cheeks we have read too many picture books but
also not enough. Drive slowly tonight there is a lot of water on the road I’m not sure
there is such a thing as an afterlife. Knee-deep in wild grass we walk in each
other’s footsteps the place we are going is not far from here. Coffins
are much lighter than what you think. Falling in and out
of love is like breathing: you don’t notice it
until something goes horribly wrong.

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Return

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Chris Lynch

In the first few jetlagged days of being
back in Australia, I always notice the birds:

the bright cacophony of rainbow lorikeets
the liquid alien throatiness of magpies

the dusty, distant, intimate confession of a crow.
But this time there’s something else as well—

as if the country is inside a dream
somehow sheared off from the dreamer.

Like looking up one day in the backyard
and seeing an enormous airship drifting by.

Then cracking open another beer.

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Freeway

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Sanna Peden

the road markings run, reflected
on my sunglasses
in swooping arches
the freeway ferns in on itself
and spits me out
where nothing happens but concrete grows

the trains don’t come this far
not now, not yet
never quite in time

they grow tomatoes now
these friends with not-enough children
and too-much time

the salad is nice, real nice
but it is still just a salad
I didn’t know heirloom basil existed
but there you go

they grow their own mangoes as well
– or rather, mangoes happen in their backyard
“they thrive on neglect”, they say
and I look for a dramatic reveal
in the way they are determined
to maintain eye contact

the fruit salad says I’m a bad friend
and I’m inclined to believe it

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The Astronomer’s Son

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Kazim Ali

At my birth, he whispered the equations of gravitational resonance into my ears. Taught me to calculate orbital positions of unseen objects.

When I was six, he used fishing twine to string up nine foam balls around the ceiling lamp in my bedroom, coloring each one with felt tipped markers.

Like the moon I turned evenly around him, always keeping one part secret.

By nine, I never liked to be touched, hated to raise my voice or shout, was lonely in groups of boys or men.

He drew me a map each night on blank chart paper. Taught me what I would see: Scorpion. Hunter. Little Dog. The Lyre.

Between the solid inner planets and the outer swirling intangible ones are the ruins that hold the whole system together. There are a dozen theories about why Saturn collected rings or Uranus lies on its side. And me? I always knew I never wasn’t what I was.

These days it is not the language of the heavens but the language of heaven that has pulled us from each other. In an astronomical equation even one digit of difference introduces light years of error.

Sometimes in my loneliness I recite to myself what snatches I can remember of what I was taught: In the shoulder of the Herdsman is Arcturus, the giant orange star.

To live I will have to leave you, I will have to forget the math of round orbits, the rule of even planes. To be true some days I do wonder: In all the endless space of the universe how will you find me?

14,000 years ago, the North Star was one of the strings of the Lyre. 12,000 years from now, it will be again.

I hurl my doubt down into all the unfolding time it takes solar music to resound against the outer planets.

After all, Of all the stars in boundless heaven, it’s the Little Dog that shines the brightest.

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Rune

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Anthony Lawrence

I did it like you said I would
in terms of how we thought
things would go accord-
ingly. And yes there’s blood
in family, love and sport
or making from our words

a tight, confused assembly
of musical notation, line
and the kind of detail hurt
thrives on when we occupy
the dark side of what’s mine
what’s yours. Therapy as art.

Art as fuck it, that’ll do.
We like it said the way we’ve
seen the matter off to bed
but sleep comes hard, and so
we lie beneath a wall of waves
that break inside our heads.

What was I saying, and why?
Have we made it here to take
measure of each other’s hands?
The day arrives, the red sky
washes in to make amends
for its downfall or atrophy.

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5 Ways to Breathe in the CBD

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Alison Flett
  1. Listen to the shoes of office-workers counting along the pavement, and your
    own shoes adding in their numbers. Write it all down as music, the black notes
    clicking and tapping.
  2. High above the multi-storey carparks the sun jellyfishes past. So slow. So
    slow. The numbers drift upwards into a belljar of silence.
  3. Feel the hands of buildings stroking your face, the electricity that lives in your
    hair, furs the inside of your ears. See how everything is cloaked in sequins of
    light and when it rains, hear the rain’s thin tinsel.
  4. Even in the bitumened streets the dead are busy beneath traffic. Their teeth
    chatter in the soil, adding and subtracting.
  5. Count the trees growing out of holes, roots cracking through tarmac as if the
    dead are reaching for your shoes. Touch the cloth of their bark as they pass
    you. Try to remember the music.
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Gas Deity

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Ed Wright

Nitrous oxide: about as close
as it gets to the gods
without sacrifice, the nonsense of origins
a pretty polly epiphany
polyphony cackling through
the wireless speakers of the mind.

It’s a shame they don’t serve religion at the dentist anymore.
It damages the brain, the wowsers say, and it’s true
that religion should be consumed in moderation,
but what’s a few cells culled from the mortal billions
while they drill.

My last dentist wore loud shirts
and installed bad crowns in mouths.
His talk of motor yachts as he drilled
and filled was a poor craftsman’s
desperate superiority, the man was all enamel,
an anger coated in achievement, my mouth
was his McMansion, his shirt an admission
of life being elsewhere. Probably Hawaii.

My new dentist takes 3d images of my jaw.
There are coloured regions like a rain chart
where the teeth press together:
mountain ranges chowing down
on the unevenness of things,
clenching the inequality of dreams.

Megabytes ride the ether,
a small mill the size of a budget printer
in the next room carves the crown.
We watch it together wearing our smiles.
Who needs gods when you can do this?
He fits it, bakes it, glues it in. So many
almost miracles, so many leaps of reason
to tantalise the understanding.
His assistant gives me the bill.

God is historical and I am on my way to join him
This dentist is younger than me
and in better touch with the future.
He looks like a movie star and I’m already looking back,
to the old days, when we self-administered religion.
We were stupid then, beginnings seemed endless,
the gods were mostly with us, we found them
when we drove to Maccas and sucked
the nitrous out of ten whipped cream bulbs
in the carpark, then tried to order burgers
from the smiling girls inside
without dissolving into laughter.

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Orange–delicious

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Elizabeth Allen

The oranges I buy
from the grocery
store are okay
if a bit over-priced.

Their skin is
unblemished.
They taste like
an orange,
have an orange’s
large roundness.

If someone asked you
to think of a fruit
that is orange,
one of these would roll
into your head.
Adjective and noun
in one pithy ball.

But they don’t compare
to the oranges
I bought from
the roadside
on my way to the farm
that time.
They were small
and ugly
but so delicious.

I ate them and now
I can’t un-eat them.

The delectable memory
quietly undermining
every piece of fruit
I eat, mocking
my weekly trips
to the store
the careful way
I load my trolley.

Making me wonder
if there is something
sweeter
more right, more real
just out of reach.

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Caitlin Maling Reviews Alison Whittaker

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Caitlin Maling

Lemons in the Chicken Wire by Alison Whittaker
Magabala Books, 2015

Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker’s debut collection Lemons in the Chicken Wire is a necessary addition to contemporary poetry. Deftly handled at both the level of the poem and the book, Whittaker’s work introduces us to the worlds of queer Aboriginal women living on the rural fringe of New South Wales. Continue reading →

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Review Short: Dennis Haskell’s Ahead of Us

Posted on April 20, 2016 by Anne-Marie Newton

Ahead of Us by Dennis Haskell
Fremantle Press, 2016

‘Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,’ wrote C. S. Lewis in a work of prose, published soon after his wife died. Under such conditions poets are apt to explore their grief by way of lyricism, and, while it is uncommon in the Australian context, recent years have seen several international male poets producing collections in just these circumstances. From the United Kingdom, for instance, we have Douglas Dunn’s Elegies and Christopher Reid’s A Scattering, and, from the United States, Donald Hall’s Without. Continue reading →

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John Forbes’s ‘Miraculous Fluidity’

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Corey Wakeling


Image courtesy of Australian Poetry Library

In a book on comedy, philosopher Alenka Zupančič has inadvertently discovered the key to the correlation of late twentieth century Australian poet John Forbes’s mastery of cultural imitation and his deconstruction of the mechanics of national identity so often queried in his work. Zupančič, infusing Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan, in a consideration of the relations assumed to exist between the vital and the mechanical, develops a theory of the comic as the maker of a ‘miraculous fluidity’. Continue reading →

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Alice Whitmore on as Translations Editor

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Alice Whitmore

We are chuffed to announce that Alice Whitmore will be Cordite Poetry Review‘s Translations Editor from the 1 August 2016 issue.

Alice is a Melbourne-based writer, literary translator and is completing a PhD in translation studies at Monash University. She is a coordinator with the Monash-Warwick Migration, Identity and Translation Network and assistant editor at The AALITRA Review. Her translations of Mexican fiction and poetry have been published by Giramondo, Ox and Pigeon’s Portable Museum, The AALITRA Review, Reinvention, Asymptote and Kodoma Kartonera. Her creative and academic work has been published by Penguin Specials, Voiceworks, The Sydney Review of Books, Dumbo Feather, Mexico City Lit, Egg Poetry, Askew, The Translator and New Voices in Translation Studies.

Alice will play a significant role in keeping the quality of our issues’ translations lofty and diverse, coming from Australia and rest-of-world.

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Review Short: Gina Mercer’s weaving nests with smoke and stone

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Siobhan Hodge

weaving nests with smoke and stone by Gina Mercer
Walleah Press, 2015

Gina Mercer’s latest collection, weaving nests with smoke and stone, is a delicate assembly of sights and sounds, visually rich and focused on the natural. Mercer’s repetition of the word ‘fossick’ throughout the collection aptly summarises the poetic processes involved. This is a collection of quick, searching movements. Lyrically deft, musical and richly preoccupied with natural elements, the poems construct meeting points for nature and humanity, ceding more and more with each piece along the way.

Continue reading →

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Dominique Hecq Reviews Charles Baudelaire: Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Dominique Hecq

Charles Baudelaire: Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
Translated by Jan Owen
ARC Publications, 2015

Les Murray endorses Jan Owen’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) on the book’s back cover: ‘Jan Owen’s Baudelaire brings the French conjuror closer to me than any version I’d ever read.’ Although we could take umbrage to the term ‘conjuror’ being used in relation to Baudelaire, it is, on closer reflection, quite apposite. In fact it may apply to the French poet as well as his Australian translator, for both are magicians in their own way. Given Baudelaire’s impact on Anglophone poetry, poetics, and criticism, he needs no introduction to many readers of Cordite Poetry Review. Continue reading →

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BAY AREA Editorial

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian
Image courtesy of Graybird Images

Neither distance, the Pacific Ocean, nor the equator can quite explain the fact that poets in the activist San Francisco Bay Area and poets in Australia with corresponding and complementary concerns, both aesthetic and socio-political, are pretty much totally unaware of each other. I would love to blame this on capitalism − on market interests, trade treaties, and copyright law, for example − and almost certainly they do play some role in erecting a barrier between us. But other factors must play a role too. Continue reading →

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8 Collages by Sofie Ramos

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Sofie Ramos


Sofie Ramos | Collage | 2016

In addition to small collage works, some of which are presented here, Sofie Ramos creates colourful and chaotic sculptural painting installations that conflate the art and its space and blur the distinction between the three-dimensional arrangement of objects in a space and the two-dimensional composition of a painting.

Continue reading →

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

Wolves

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Brandon Brown

In the last winter on
earth I walk through
the woods giving a
poetry reading.

I give it to wolves gazing out from
behind big clumpy weeds wearing
snow wigs. My own wig was pure
pelf, my poem a cadenced paean to
pelts. Wet pants beneath belt.
When there’s no more winters
where are all these wolves gonna
go? The trees melting into the
forest floor, it’s going to
be that hot, everywhere
in the world. Thank God I hate
skiing and hockey and every other winter activity
except for slipping down a slim path to a hot hot
tub, with you in it.

In my former life
I was a snowflake,
drifting into someone’s coffee to make it
that much shittier
to drink. You can just tell.
Although I’m trying to be sweeter now,

sweet as banana-fried
sundae, swimming in
chocolate lava.

In the life before that one I was a motherfucking
wolf! Six to eight years I medium-raged in a
still pretty chilly wood. When lil
fascists came to suck at my nip I
said nope! I ate plums and drank
plums. I knew what I was, host
to an army of ticks that loved
powdered sugar snow caught in the
clefts
of my fur. A wolf,
I’d tumble around the snow, mouth
all smeared with fruity
mess, giving poetry
readings.

I guess when there’s no more
winter there won’t be any more
falling
into precarious ice and
drowning in the lake. Twelve
months
of lemonade cut with freeze cups,
chewing up chicken wings
ravenous, sweating on the porch,
translating Horace’s beautiful poem
about walking through a field
right where taxes meet vestigial
commons. I mean right where, so close
he can
see it and put it in his poem,
singing a song to himself about how
hot this ass looked, bouncing on top
of his toga. Snapping the cot. Roman
solstice. Gasoline smells coming
off a chariot. Pretty hot. The
poem
only lapses into racist reference twice.
A record for him!

It’s going to be so hot when all
I want to do in this incarnation is
stay cool. Antarctic. Barbecue
on Neptune cool. Eileen Myles cool.
Walk through woods, reading my
poems to the wolves.
They are discerning readers. They love
my new work. I make eye
contact with them through the
reeds. While there are still reeds,
while there are still wolves, I’m
out there walking
in ridiculous
weather, in a
ridiculous get-up
tweeting at the
cubs.

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