- 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
Bella Li
Bad Naturalisations
So why bring Veronica Forrest-Thomson into a discussion of Asian Australian poetry? There are a couple of circumstantial coincidences: she was born in British Malaya (her father was a rubber planter) and found an able and sympathetic expositor in the Australian poet Martin Harrison, who gave a 1979 ABC Radio talk on Poetic Artifice.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Bella Li, Cher Tan, Grace Ugamay Dulawan, James Jiang, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Vidya Rajan
Rory Green Reviews Theory of Colours by Bella Li
Bella Li’s hybrid poetics of text and image are instantly recognisable. Her third collection Theory of Colours follows on structurally and stylistically from her well-received earlier works: Argosy (2017, Vagabond Books) and Lost Lake (2018, Vagabond Books). Here, as with her previous collections, alchemical concoctions of form and genre blend source materials into sequences with a commitment to the surreal and uncanny.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bella Li, Rory Green
Submission to Cordite 107: LIMINAL
Liminal and Cordite are seeking poems by Asian Australian writers.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Bella Li, Cher Tan, James Jiang, Kent MacCarter, Leah Jing McIntosh
CHROMA
From here the region is reached by a narrow road, a long interval spaced with recesses. To arrive one must pass through the ruined and populous village.
Bella Li on as Associate Publisher
I’m honoured to announce that Bella Li will be joining Cordite Books as Associate Publisher. There is much activity with the books, and her masterful eye, publishing nous, and creativity will be a welcome and necessary addition.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Bella Li, Kent MacCarter
Introduction to Pascalle Burton’s About the Author Is Dead
Pascalle Burton’s About the Author is Dead refers to, and opens with an epigraph from, Roland Barthes’s seminal essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Inside the collection, we find not one author but many: David Byrne and Grace Jones, Miranda July and Jacques Derrida; authors who are filmmakers, authors who are poets, philosophers and musicians.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Bella Li, Kent MacCarter, Pascalle Burton, Zoë Sadokierski
CIRCLES (A Parable)
Let us descend into the blind world now Prologue In my thirty-third year, midway upon the course, I found, I began I entered like a curse. Through stones through rocky stars, and the pinions descending. Furiously I awoke. Sad, miserly, …
Kate Middleton Reviews Bella Li
Bella Li’s Argosy offers readers a book of real adventure: the adventure of form, and a challenge to our sense of what shapes a narrative. This work is fundamentally hybrid: amid short texts and textual sequences that may be termed prose poems, or micro-essays, or short short fictions, Li intersperses works of collage and photography.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bella Li, Kate Middleton
Tell Me Like You Mean It: New Poems from Young and Emerging Writers
‘Emerging’ is a strange word, and ‘strange’ is probably a cop out. It is often arbitrary, sometimes condescending, frequently empowering and often carries with it an incredible sense of community.
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Alison Whittaker, Amelia Dale, Anupama Pilbrow, Bella Li, Claire Nashar, Elena Gomez, Ella O'Keefe, Emily Stewart, Evelyn Araluen, Hera Lindsay Bird, Holly Childs, Holly Isemonger, Jessica Mei Cham, Leah Muddle, Magan Magan, Marjon Mossammaparast, Melody Paloma, Mikaila Hanman Siegersma, Oscar Schwartz, Ryan Prehn, Saaro Umar, Sian Vate, Stacey Teague
FUTURE MACHINES Editorial
The theme for this issue arose from a chance encounter with a flying machine and a Frenchman.
Submission to Cordite 55: FUTURE MACHINES
Image by Joshua Comyn Poetry for Cordite 55: FUTURE MACHINES is guest-edited by Bella Li. To conceive of future machines is to imagine what haunts the boundary, always fluid, always negotiated, between the possible and impossible. To figure the distance, …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Bella Li, Kent MacCarter
Bella Li Reviews Pascalle Burton and Nathan Shepherdson
Experimental filmmaker, choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer, Maya Deren was a seminal figure in twentieth-century avant-garde art and theory. To begin with Deren’s words is to follow in the footsteps of Pascalle Burton’s and Nathan Shepherdson’s UN/SPOOL and A gram of ideas on art, form and film – twinned works that are simultaneously homages to, and dialogues with, Deren’s own work and ideas, and entirely new and original pieces of art.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bella Li, nathan shepherdson, Pascalle Burton
237, The Overlook
Act I Sometime during the winter. In the West Wing the caretaker stacks (neatly, with axe) 20 legs of lamb, 12 turkeys, 2 dozen pork roasts. The Adler on the table in the great white hall (lots of ideas, no …
Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT
Tagged Bella Li
Gig Ryan Reviews Emma Lew, Bella Li, Kate Lilley, and Jennifer Maiden
Elegy intensifies around the objects that remain, those keepsakes that must signify a spent life. In Kate Lilley’s Realia, the first poem ‘GG’ is an auction listing from Greta Garbo’s estate in which the repetition of Garbo’s name intones like a docked requiem. Only things exist timeless, immutable, saleable, as shining representatives of the once-living. Life’s fraught event is reduced to its acquisitions, and transformed, satirised, into capitalism’s ultimate wearer of labels: the former consumer of commodities is now more amenably cast purely as a selection of those objects, whose value her absence increases.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bella Li, Emma Lew, Gig Ryan, Jennifer Maiden, Kate Lilley
Review Short: James Stuart’s Anonymous Folk Songs
On the cover of James Stuart’s debut collection Anonymous Folk Songs is an image of a series of kites strung together; tethered to a darkened cityscape, they stretch away from it, curving upwards into the sky above. In any scene where the light falling upon subjects differs, the photographer must choose which part of the image to correctly expose – and therefore to highlight – the earth or sky, the kites or clouds. The photograph is Stuart’s own, and it is the sky that takes up most of the frame, that retains depth and a complexity of colour and tone. And yet the unbroken black silhouette of an urban skyline anchors the sky, just as a barely visible line of string anchors the desiring kites to ground. The same impulse that animates this image on the cover is embedded in the poems within.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bella Li, James Stuart
Asian Australian Diasporic Poets: A Commentary
This essay provides a survey of the poetry of some Asian Australian poets, and does not attempt to be definitive. Diasporic poetics raise more questions than they answer and are just as much about dis-placement as about place, just as much about a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ as about certainties of style/nation/identity.
You saw me first Isabella
~Keats: Isabella or The Pot of Basil (after Boccaccio) You saw me first Isabella, passing beneath your window. Tongue stilled, dagger at my throat. You mistook my silence for indifference. I smiled in spite of myself. The wind filled …
Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS
Tagged Bella Li