- 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
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