Bella Li



IL BAMBINO

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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.

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CENTURY INFINITY

            ENTER

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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.

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Submission to Cordite 107: LIMINAL

Liminal and Cordite are seeking poems by Asian Australian writers.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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, …

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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.

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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.

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FUTURE MACHINES Editorial

The theme for this issue arose from a chance encounter with a flying machine and a Frenchman.

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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, …

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 …

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