James Jiang



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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James Jiang on as Literature Essays Editor

I’m honoured to announce that James Jiang will be taking up the helm of Literature Essays Editor for Cordite Poetry Review. His care, craft and academic nous is peerless. James Jiang is a writer, editor, and recovering academic based in …

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Submission to Cordite 107: LIMINAL

Liminal and Cordite are seeking poems by Asian Australian writers.

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The Stakes of Settlement: Fences in Ned Kelly and Michael Farrell

Signalling possession, privatisation, and productivity, the fence was one of the main props by which a cadastral grid (comprised of adjoining rectangular land parcels) was imposed on the Australian landscape.

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James Jiang Reviews Duncan Hose’s The Jewelled Shillelagh

‘HELLO FAERE CUNTIES!’ we are hailed in the opening lines of this rough-and-tumble volume, which swings between the campy and the choleric, the vatic and the venereal.

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James Jiang Reviews To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry from America, Australia, UK & Europe

An anthology like this one that aims to be so broadly representative puts itself in a paradoxical position where the failure to articulate a coherent voice amounts to a kind of success.

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Review Short: Kate Middleton’s Passage

In the prefatory poem titled ‘Lyric’, Kate Middleton writes of ‘Voices torn, / pieced, re-sewn’, a phrase that neatly captures the allusive texture and patchwork procedures of her third collection Passage.

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Review Short: Brian Castro’s Blindness and Rage

Blindness and Rage is the latest addition to an oeuvre that has established Brian Castro as a prodigy of hybridity. Castro’s heritage (Portuguese, Chinese, and English) is as uniquely mixed as the generic categories of his work, such as the blend of fiction and autobiography that won him such acclaim in Shanghai Dancing (2003).

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Review Short: Maged Zaher’s the consequences of my body

This is love poetry for the Tao Lin generation. The consequences of my body offers a discourse on desire as it is mediated by the electronic interfaces that obviate the need for ‘skin to skin contact’ even as they turn out to exacerbate it: email, Skype, Facebook, Netflix (and chill).

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