- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with 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
ann vickery
Situated Song, Motherhood and Creativity: Ann Vickery Reviews Kate Fagan and Tais Rose Wae
Song in the Grass by Kate Fagan Giramondo, 2024 Riverbed Sky Songs by Tais Rose Wae Vagabond Press, 2023 Both Kate Fagan’s Song in the Grass (Giramondo, 2024) and Tais Rose Wae’s Riverbed Sky Songs (Vagabond Press, 2023) take motherhood …
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged ann vickery, Kate Fagan, Tais Rose Wae
Seasonal Feminists
(to Jin Eun-Young) In spring, we planned our futures Yes to a thousand stars cradling the canopy, the hope of power in multitudes. In summer, the fragrant drift Yes to lovers and the early climb across glass peaks, unwalled and …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged ann vickery
Perfect Timing
The work of the cloud is lonely and continuous. The rider from Brazil unable to find other work during lockdown. Whose bike and capacity to ride remained unchecked, lucky to leave with just a broken arm. In such jocund company, …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged ann vickery
In a Nutshell
The shape of a son hidden in the tablecloth green. The cherries were painted, smiled as the dish was stirred with the spoon that occasionally doubled as a knife. You had a ready mouth for ripeness. She taught you that …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged ann vickery
Alexis Late Reviews Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack by Ann Vickery
In ‘Wintering’, the closing poem from her posthumous collection Ariel, and the last in her quintuple sequence about bees, Sylvia Plath writes: ‘will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?’ At the time of editing, Plath was enduring one of the coldest English winters on record, one so cold that the Thames froze over.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alexis Late, ann vickery
Manky Bandaid Sandwich
Mammalian life trying hard not to exist as manky bandaid sandwich. The fillings that serve as the space between us, flesh echoes in the conversational cloud. Miry, like margarine, swan songs of a sensory condition that lies mute, inarticulate, in …
Posted in 93: PEACH
Tagged ann vickery
Concept Creep
It’s not a reflection on you, climbing the stairs to happiness (what flights?), trying to leave at the door the low-tops of ambivalent love. Whose turn is it to shock absorb the ordinary once more? Emotional labour slides in restaged …
Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII
Tagged ann vickery
In Confederates we Couple
(Q.E.D.) To speculate on compound vision, the world reprizes: one and one is one. Each arc of a lover’s conjecture creatures toward incendiary light. The soul’s algebra draws upon an angle of landscape at once perishable and precise. We sup …
Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS
Tagged ann vickery
Un(dis)closed: Reading the Poetry of Emma Lew
As with contemporaries like Claire Gaskin (Paperweight) and Kate Lilley (Versary, particularly ‘Mint in Box: A Pantoum Set’), Emma Lew has turned to fixed poetic forms like the pantoum and the villanelle. Constraint is both formally enacted and thematically explored.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged ann vickery, Emma Lew
On Not Giving an Account of Oneself
for Dann & bindlestiff cyberpunk I am telling a story without prehistory. Pocket rockets of pink, the go to temple of gum blossom. Rays of morning sun settling on the driver’s side. By way of warning, I would say I …
Posted in 78: CONFESSION
Tagged ann vickery
David Gilbey Reviews Ann Vickery and Brendan Ryan
These two recent volumes from the distinguished Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets series are about as different from each other as umeboshi and camembert, and – as I’ve found when wanting to impress Japanese visitors with a striking new taste combination that has the energy and disorder of a good poem (to cite Tom Shapcott’s useful terms) – such obverses delight with both surprise and recognition.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged ann vickery, Brendan Ryan, David Gilbey
Popping Candy by the Kerb
This suburb is getting crowded. Trying to Pokémon Go with a Baudelaire avatar and running into the usual night terrors. Replaced footpaths, replaced neighbours, discovering how to accessorise with greys. Can we have a plebiscite vote over the return of …
Posted in 77: EXPLODE
Tagged ann vickery
An Object exists only as it might exist to Another
The melancholia of not being Anne Boyer. The melancholia of melancholy, of listening for factories out there in the sea when everyone else was searching for whales. The melancholia of a word without a poem, of the poem as pristine …
Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES
Tagged ann vickery
Introduction to Claire Nashar’s Lake
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski In Lake, Claire Nashar navigates the connections between people and between person and place in a striking elegy not only for her grandmother, leading geology academic Beryl Nashar, but also for Tuggerah Lake, an estuary …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged ann vickery, Claire Nashar, Kent MacCarter, Zoë Sadokierski
Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series
These ten tiny tomes each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Angela Gardner, ann vickery, Anselm Berrigan, Dan Disney, Don Mee Choi, Jaimie Gusman, Maged Zaher, Pam Brown, Rachel Loden, Stephanie Christie, Susan Schultz, Toby Fitch
Against Colony Collapse Disorder; or, Settler Mess in the Cells of Contemporary Australian Poetry
Colony collapse disorder describes a phenomenon whereby worker bees suddenly and inexplicably disappear from a hive. It has recently been identified as a syndrome following the rapid vanishing of Western honeybee colonies across North America and Europe. Justin Clemens also uses the term to describe an aesthetic collapse, whereby poets can only demonstrate their existence as ‘being caught dead’ given the fragile conditions of poetry and the inevitable, deadly effects of the past.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alex McDermott, ann vickery, Duncan Hose, Justin Clemens, michael farrell, Philip Mead, Samuel Wagan Watson
Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace
Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged ann vickery, Bonny Cassidy, David McCooey, Elizabeth Wilson, Emily Bitto, Emily Finlay, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Hawke, John Kinsella, john tranter, Justin Clemens, Kate Fagan, Kate Lilley, Keri Glastonbury, Kim Cheng Boey, Lionel Fogarty, Melissa Boyd, Melissa Hardie, Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Simon West, Susan Stewart, Thomas Ford
Silénzio / Scienza: Registering 5 in Joan Retallack’s Errata 5uite
Joan Retallack describes her second major book, Errata 5uite, published with Edge Books (Washington, D.C.) in 1993, as a ‘silent suite.’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Andrew Carruthers, ann vickery, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joan Retallack, John Cage
MASQUE Editorial
The theme of this issue was suggested by the Poets and Critics seminar (run by Vincent Broqua and Olivier Brossard) on the work of British poet Redell Olsen last year. Olsen’s book Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel (subpress, 2012) revels in masques and anti-masques, in variants and endlessly shifting suggestiveness that has influences back to the sixteenth century but also resonates with Frank O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged ann vickery, Redell Olsen
Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning
Forearmed is foredefeated, a spragged illusion that had me forever check the silver-leafed backing. What seemed like a vermillion mirror of sea, the work of rash gods competing over nose-powder and light. Salient image as tonnage of froth, the superficial …
Posted in 56: NO THEME II
Tagged ann vickery
Submission to Cordite 43: MASQUE is now open!
This issue is the Masque. It extends an invite to displays of Devices and Mythic Mayhem. It desires to entertain Bold Interiors of Poetic Fancy and Brocaded Rewindings, Lyricised run-ons and flirtatious Kinks in the Narrative. A toying with Masks and Anti-Masks of identity, gender guises and human conceit.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged ann vickery, Jeremy Balius, Lily Mae Martin
Vivienne; or, A Little Local History
Style: the Sibyl’s only available expression. Reversible epigrams filched as seasonal must from the fathers. You think assassination a pretext for kindness. Love in the time of your own good collar her bag of ferrets, the hide, not the fathoms. …
Posted in 55: RATBAGGERY
Tagged ann vickery
Re: NO THEME II Submissions
Just a quick thanks to the 423 of you – and your accumulated snowfall of 1200+ poems – who submitted to Cordite 42: NO THEME II with poetry guest-edited by Gig Ryan. That’s quite the crush of submissions from around …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged ann vickery, Gig Ryan
