- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
Ali Alizadeh
The Fall of the West
Despite cutbacks, delays, interruptions the poison in my stomach didn’t succeed. Had to walk from the station of course, no more buses after 11pm. Feet sincerely sore, the night suitably spooky, at least rain didn’t add to my despair. Public …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
The Non-Vegetarian
(after Han Kang) It makes perfect sense, really to make the most of this body before the rot sets in. Maybe a premature sky burial, and who better than the ghost in this deadbeat machine to preside as chef de …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
The 3rd Poem
(for Sin Yong-Mok) Cross-cultural implies there are cultures to cross. There are bodies and languages sure, but cultures? What is so innately different between kimchi and vegemite these things one eats, then one forgets about as they’re transformed into a …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Joel Ephraims Reviews Ashbery Mode Edited by Michael Farrell
The presence of John Ashbery shines over contemporary literature, for many as an enigma, indisputably as a catalyst. Part of the post-World War II wave of new American poetry, his name is grouped not just alongside his contemporary poets but among their literary schools and movements: the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, our own ’68ers and J.A.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Angela Gardner, Craig Hallsworth, Jacek Pakula, Jill Jones, Joel Ephraims, john tranter, Julie Chevalier, michael farrell, Toby Fitch
Poetry Against Neoliberal Capitalism in Ali Alizadeh and Melinda Bufton
Poetry has a long history of disruption, resistance, and revolution, overlapping the concerns of politics with literature and the boundaries of language.
Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Angela McRobbie, John Zilcosky, Julia Clark, Melinda Bufton, michael brennan, Sarah Banet-Weiser
‘Beware! This is not a real biography!’: Ali Alizadeh Interviews Jessica L Wilkinson
To many, biographies are a generic section in a bookshop which showcase – as this interview will discuss – a supposed element of ‘truth’. Suggestions of worthiness through platitudes such as ‘based on a true story’ or a ‘definitive biography …
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, George Balanchine, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Marion Davies, Percy Grainger, Rae Armantrout
A Poetics of a Politics
When delivering a thesis presentation based on rethinking the methodologies for reading Aboriginal Australian poetics, a fellow postgraduate student asked me, ‘Do you consider your thesis political?’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Dashiell Moore, Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Gloria Anzaldua, John Kinsella, Ledelle Moe, Lionel Fogarty, Stuart Cooke
EXPLODE Editorial: Awfully Passionate Egregious Demagogueries … reflections on absolutes, straying, anguish and bees
If poets are in the business of cultivating ‘voice’ then, logically enough, to which ends? Is there an onus not only to learn how to speak but to also become versed in what to speak of?
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Cassandra Atherton, Dan Disney, Kim Cheng Boey
Plato, Badiou and I: an Experiment in Writerly Happiness
I have many irresolvable arguments with a close and particularly argumentative friend of mine. We regularly disagree, in a civilised, congenial way, on specific topics to do with politics, love, the weather, Asian food and ethics.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alain Badiou, Ali Alizadeh, Michel Foucault, Plato
Off Kilter
This be the fulcrum, order’s pivot. Powers oscillate my words the rivet, evil, chthonic, to show you malfeasance, the urgency to recompense, the levers wholly off kilter: 1) The tigerfish is the carnivore of the Congo. Obtruding fangs eyes tenebrous …
Posted in 77: EXPLODE
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Chris Andrews
In a recent article published in Sydney Review of Books, Emmett Stinson argues that Australian reviewers’ and readers’ responses to Australian short story collections are regulated by the receptions of these authors in the US. And so, according to Stinson, the so-called cultural cringe lives on. But is this really the case? And should we really be suspicious of internationally recognised Australian writers such as Chris Andrews whose second collection of poems has been published by Baltimore’s Waywiser Press, the publishers of such giants of US poetry as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur and W. D. Snodgrass?
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Chris Andrews, Emmett Stinson
Ali Alizadeh Interviews Paul Kane
Paul Kane is the Professor of English and Co-Associate Chair of English at Vassar College in the Hudson Valley, 75 miles north of New York City. In addition to being a prolific poet and scholar of American literature, he is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Australian poetry.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Australian poetry, Paul Kane
Ali Alizadeh Reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2012’
Whatever one may expect from an anthology of contemporary poetry released by a mainstream commercial publisher – an accessible selection of diverse voices and styles, one for both the non-specialist, general reader as well as the (less snobbish) connoisseur, a selection featuring promising emerging writers as well as more prominent authors, and so on – Black Inc. Publishing’s annual Best Australian Poems Series has been meeting these expectations, more or less consistently, for close to a decade. And despite the series’ many specific strengths and few weaknesses, the latest addition to the series follows the same general tradition successfully.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Felicity Plunkett, Jessica L. Wilkinson, john tranter
THE REALPOETIK MANIFESTO
FOR TOO LONG has poetry been disregarded as a valid vehicle for the exploration of real world experience. Too often has poetry been filed in the ‘too hard’ basket and deemed ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inaccessible.’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Jessica L. Wilkinson
Act #12
Vintage in verisimilitude. Private Sale – Vacant Position – Business 1 Zone. Scent of sandalwood, inconsequential bells, organic food and runes. Fortitude begs futurism. Health store – Home ware – Souvenirs. Unrequited regret: fetish value fades from my wallet, untold …
Posted in 49: SYDNEY
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Comings, Goings and GUNCOTTON
There is only one appropriate way to begin my first news post as Managing Editor of Cordite – that being to extend, then extend further, then possibly dislocating my e-arm in extending further still, a massive thank you (for all …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Adrian Wiggins, Ali Alizadeh, David Prater, editors, Emilie Zoey Baker, Emily Stewart, GUNCOTTON, Kent MacCarter, Matthew Hall
Ali Alizadeh Reviews David Brooks
‘Ern Malley? Again?’ asks David Brooks at the outset of this new reading of what is, arguably, the central event in the history of modern Australian poetry. Brooks’s account is an engrossing, at times exhilarating journey through the landscape of early-mid twentieth century Modernist poetry, but it also leaves the question of the need for yet another volume about the infamous hoax more or less unanswered.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, David Brooks, ern malley
Tina Giannoukos Reviews Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh’s latest collection, Ashes in the Air, blows across the fault lines of our manifold present. These are poems of strong rhetorical force. With remarkable alertness to volatile complexities, they engage in an argument with barely comprehensible realities of exclusion and inclusion. They are radical, philosophical and profoundly affective.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter
In his 2007 essay ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’, David McCooey identified the prevailing mode of poetry in contemporary Australia as a negotiation between experimentalism (the new) and traditional composition (lyricism). This view is apposite in describing the work of many important poets of the last couple of decades; but a number of newer Australian poets have gone beyond and broken with this conciliation.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Claire Potter, Maria Takolander
Aa-zaa-dee (아-자-디)
How can I define this Real of language in words? Signs betray its unsayable being like a hoax. Has no authenticity cheated by fakeness; condemns all things to fantasy. How can I praise this enemy of appreciation? When it’s around …
Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK)
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Kim Sunghyun
Grey (회색빛)
for Felicity Plunkett i In this World – which is not a world – black and white withhold truths. In a world we’d have multiplicities, the purity of unqualified impurities. In ours we possess , are possessed by, the comprehension …
Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK)
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Kim Sunghyun
Ali Alizadeh Reviews John Mateer
Since the publication of his startling first collection Burning Swans in 1989, John Mateer has established himself as one of the key Australian poets who, for the absence of a better term, can be broadly labelled post-Generation of ’68. What my clumsy terminology seeks to indicate is that Mateer (alongside other younger poets such as those appearing in the seminal 2000 anthology Calyx) follows in the general direction of earlier innovators while making crucial, although not necessarily generational, departures.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, John Mateer
