- 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
Caitlin Maling
Cicadas
After Dimitra Harvey In my marriage we argue over building, offer each other tenders, bid on chores. I read my friend’s poem about cicadas, each season of stanzas carefully kneaded. She is a cook, bakes cakes so real the sugar …
Posted in 111: BABY
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Caitlin Maling Reviews Dennis Haskell, Maree Dawes, Amy Lin and Miriam Wei Wei Lo
It’s a flourishing time for Western Australian poetry and publishing. We have seen the well-publicised launch of Terri-Anne White’s press Upswell (responsible for Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award’s shortlisted Clean) as well as the retention and success of UWA Publishing (who are currently bringing us the collected works of John Kinsella), while existing houses Magabala Books (home to Charmaine Papertalk Green, Ambelin Kwaymullina, and Elfie Shiosaki) and Fremantle Press (Andrew Sutherland’s 2022 Paradise: Point of Transmission having just been shortlisted for the Small Press Network Book of the Year) go strength-to-strength.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Amy Lin, Caitlin Maling, Dennis Haskell, Maree Dawes, Miriam Wei Wei Lo
NO THEME 12 Editorial
We have had the honour of editing this issue as two poets with collections published and forthcoming with Fremantle Press, and invited by Kent in the spirit of ‘shining a light’ on the thriving and amorphous field and bush that might be called ‘Western Australian poetry’.
Posted in 109: NO THEME 12, ESSAYS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Nadia Rhook
Submission to Cordite 109: NO THEME 12
We are now up to one dozen issues where there is no theme.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Carolyn D Wright, Kent MacCarter, Nadia Rhook
Connor Weightman Reviews Gregory Kan’s Under Glass and Caitlin Maling’s Fish Song
Under Glass is the second book of poetry by New Zealand author Gregory Kan. Blurbed as a ‘dialogue between a series of prose poems … and a series of verse poems’, a reader might also happily call it a long poem or a verse novel.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Connor Weightman, Gregory Kan
Plague
i) Walking in white socks, you watch the black dots jump and stick, trying to feel their way to where the blood is easier. Somehow they don’t sting and pinching them doesn’t crack, instead your blood is there on your …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Diego’s Head
‘when[ever] I draw or sculpt or paint a head from memory it always turns out to be more or less Diego’s…’ Giacometti etd in. James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, circa 1964), p. 24. …
Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Winners for the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem 2016
Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2016 Selection panel: Chloe Wilson and Robert Sullivan Winner …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged brett dionysius, Caitlin Maling, Chloe Wilson, Damen O'Brien, Miro Bilbrough, Robert Sullivan
Conversion
I watch people gain weight. Not in the way a man on the internet pays a woman in another state to eat red velvet cake over a webcam does. But in the way of tides and sandbanks, or tulips emerging …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Caitlin Maling Reviews Ellen van Neerven
Poems about food, such as those comprising Ellen van Neerven’s first collection Comfort Food, are often framed in terms of ideas of connection, community, and commonality. Van Neerven engages directly with these ideas, but emphasises their fault lines as much as their strengths. The poem I keep returning to appears early in the second of the book’s six loose sections.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Ellen van Neerven
The Falling
I want the building that stretches up past the top of the white like driving up a summer road into heat-haze that ends, might end, here with low gray and I never noticed the sky. Why fear what’s out of …
Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Recommendations for a Western Australian Coastal Pastoral
I am thinking about limits. The gaps between limits. Liminal, littoral spaces. The most fundamental part of ‘human’ consciousness is defined by lack of limits. Unless it is limited by life and death which are themselves littoral rather than literal …
Posted in 74: NO THEME V
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Caitlin Maling Reviews Alison Whittaker
Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker’s debut collection Lemons in the Chicken Wire is a necessary addition to contemporary poetry. Deftly handled at both the level of the poem and the book, Whittaker’s work introduces us to the worlds of queer Aboriginal women living on the rural fringe of New South Wales.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alison Whittaker, Caitlin Maling
Tim Wright Reviews Caitlin Maling
Few writers seem to get the viciousness of Perth. John Mateer’s early poems do, and some of Deborah Robertson’s short stories. There’s also Laurie Duggan’s one-liner, ‘you can see why all the really savage punk bands came from here’ (‘Things to Do in Perth’), and for the encyclopaedic and lyrical, John Kinsella’s wonderful, aptly sprawling ‘Perth Poem’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, Tim Wright
Review Short: Alex Skovron’s Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems
While I was walking in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston with my cousin, I found myself discussing the conversations I seem doomed to repeat, the seemingly circular unending ones I’ve had over years, with myself and others without resolution.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alex Skovron, Caitlin Maling
Directions
Karinjini by way of Kataby, Geraldton, Dongara, Carnarvon, Exmouth; by way of the Brand; by way of driving out at midnight, by way of fences and flametrees and bardi; by way of moonlight and the dog-star, the cross and Corona …
Posted in 61: NO THEME III
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Eurydice Speaks
(after Edward Hirsch) I You didn’t know how I hid my head in darkness, a child in the oak avoiding moonlight. How I could touch with only closed curtains, snuffed candle lingering in hair, in breath. How your skin burnt …
Posted in 60: SILENCE
Tagged Caitlin Maling
Planting Roots: A Survey of Introductions to Ecopoetry and Ecocriticism
This year the most comprehensive attempt at anthologising American ecopoetry was released in the form of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Fisher-Wirth & Gray-Street). This work comes in the wake of increased ecoconsciouness in political, social, personal, academic and poetic spheres. This is the year that President Obama announced ‘global warming is real’ and all of America was forced, finally, to listen. Critical work addressing the ecological context of poetry, specifically ecocriticsm, has existed since Scigaj’s Four Eco-Poets (1999) and was expanded in Bryson’s Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002); yet, while these works do a lot to initiate the conversation over what could be considered ecopoetry, it was not until The Ecopoetry Anthology that an attempt to gather and present the poetry itself was made in earnest.
Caitlin Maling Reviews Randolph Stow
In his masterful and extensive introduction to The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems John Kinsella, who edited the volume, writes that much of Randolph Stow’s work is metaphoric, weaving things together in a way that promises narrative but actually reveals very little. Reading through this new selected poems, I was struck by the tension of poetry as public utterance of private speech, which characterizes Stow’s work. Whether dealing with myth, landscape, colonialism or love, these are poems that are selective in what they choose to reveal and particular in the techniques they use to reveal.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Caitlin Maling, John Kinsella, Randolph Stow
Tacit Knowledge
Driving back from Zavalla at 5pm along some road towards Courpsville wondering exactly what I’m meant to watch the ice do on the bridge. This morning a snake came up from the undergrowth and I didn’t know whether it could …
Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC
Tagged Caitlin Maling
