- 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
Lucy Van
HYPERTHYROIDISM: Lucy Van Reviews Shastra Deo and Dominic Symes
I spent much of 2023 inadvertently giving Shastra Deo’s The Exclusion Zone the silent treatment. I felt, for reasons now irrelevant, consigned to my own bathetic exclusion zone, as if the book were a forbidden, inaccessible text. So exclusive: as if to read The Exclusion Zone would be in violation of the text’s manifest function.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Dominic Symes, Lucy Van, Shastra Deo
Can Poetry Be Happy?
My uncle named his retro-fitted army van after Field Marshal Erick Von … someone. I’m hesitant to Google.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Corey Wakeling, Corey Worthington, Gareth Morgan, Gig Ryan, John Ashbery, Lucy Van
Open Relations: Angela Biscotti on Lucy Van
Perhaps the moment-to-moment labour of crafting verse is not wildly dissimilar to the invisible quotidian acts of looking after those we love.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Angela Biscotti, Lucy Van
VERRITION
1. Verrition: an untranslatable term Césaire used to indicate a kind of sweeping. Not really: it was a term to indicate the double jouissance of licking words, over and over again. But that is not unlike sweeping, and sweeping is …
Posted in 107: LIMINAL
Tagged Lucy Van
2022 Queensland Poetry Val Vallis Award Winners
Introducing the 2022 Queensland Poetry Val Vallis Prize winners.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Bethany Stapleton, Damen O'Brien, Dan Hogan, Lucy Van, Sophia Walsh
Introduction to Lucy Van’s The Open
All doors are open in Lucy Van’s poetry. Ingress and egress are multiple, even coincident. We’ve just touched what’s here, or are about to touch it, when apprehension is quickly unsettled, halted or reconfigured.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Lucy Van, Merlinda Bobis, Zoë Sadokierski
Tell Me Like You Mean It 4
With the glorious task of commissioning writers for a new collection of sincere, heartfelt writing for Tell Me Like You Mean It volume 4, I found it took longer than usual.
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Amelia Zhou, Anita Solak, Arben Dzika, Bobuq Sayed, Dominic Symes, Emma Rayward, Hannah Donnelly, Holly Friedlander Liddicoat, Kaya Lattimore, Kiki Amberber, Lily Cameron, Lucy Van, Mitch Tomas Cave, Panda Wong, Rickiesha Deegan, Riley Daisy Frances, Shastra Deo, Sophie Rasic, Susie Anderson
Because It’s Slower It Races Away
Someone at the place that used to be Michel’s Patisserie but is now called something else and is in fact something entirely else but despite efforts seems more generic than Michel’s Patisserie with its new mint green and blonde wood …
PEACH Editorial
On 23 April 1979, Blair Peach, a teacher from New Zealand, was killed by a blow to the head delivered by an officer of the Metropolitan Police Force Special Patrol Group (SPG).
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged George Mouratidis, Ling Toong, Lucy Van
Submission to Cordite 93: PEACH
A ripe peach may seem the embodiment of the good life, but in this issue, PEACH also stands for the bitterness of brutality as well as the richness of resistance.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged George Mouratidis, Kent MacCarter, Ling Toong, Lucy Van
Lucy Van Reviews Merlinda Bobis
So begins ‘driving to katoomba’, from the first poetry collection that Merlinda Bobis published in Australia, Summer was a fast train without terminals (Spinifex, 1998). The opening is typical of Bobis’s inimitable gusto and extravagance: the lines follow the gesture of the body that reaches for a view, simultaneously craving and offering the world while delighting in the knowledge that both impulses remain unfulfilled.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Lucy Van, Merlinda Bobis
World of Feelings: Ghassan Hage, Bruce O’Neill, Magic Steven and the Affective Dimensions of Globalisation
Drive anywhere in Australia for long enough and you’ll pass a Bunnings Warehouse. Bunnings, a titanic home improvement merchant whose buying power enables the offering of low prices on products relating to the building and maintenance of the home, was around when I grew up in Australia, but I think my family went to a different, no-name hardware store.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Bruce O’Neill, Ghassan Hage, Jennifer Maiden, Lucy Van, Magic Steven, Siegfried Kracauer
Lucy Van Reviews Little Windows 1 with Jill Jones, Andy Jackson, Alison Flett and John Glenday
The full set of LW1 arrives in the post like a present, a gift-wrapped bundle of square, slate-coloured books. It came to me looking so perfect, that a couple of days passed before I had the heart to a prise a chapbook from under the clear binding ribbon. This situation gave shape to a thought about the necessity of obstruction in order for words to seduce. Some form of this theory of desire continued to occur to me as I read the books’ divergent visions.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alison Flett, Andy Jackson, Jill Jones, John Glenday, Lucy Van
Lucy Van in as Short Reviews Editor
I am pleased to announce that Lucy Van has joined the Cordite Poetry Review masthead as Short Reviews Editor. She will assume duties near the end of 2015, starting with all new short reviews commissioned at that time. Lucy Van …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Kent MacCarter, Lucy Van
Review Short: Lucy Dougan’s The Guardians
‘The dog ran in there / It had been a mistake / to take up his old trail.’ The bold lines that open ‘The Old House’ (48) from Lucy Dougan’s latest collection, The Guardians, deliver a fine sample of Dougan’s deceptive simplicity. What better emblem for the concept of guardianship than the family dog? But the sentimental cocktail of love and loyalty embodied by this familiar friend is immediately crosscut by the ‘mistake’ of memory, an error of the senses that leads directly to the unheimlich.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Lucy Dougan, Lucy Van
Review Short: Ivy Ireland’s Porch Light
By way of introduction permit me to share that for some reason I keep conflating this poet’s name with the title of her latest book. The result is a hybrid of name and place, forming a vague ‘place-name’ in the utterly made-up signifier ‘Porchland.’ Working back, this topos, to my mind, alluding to a libidinous, transgressive and, above all, fertile ground, is formed out of the name of the talented poet, Ivy Ireland, and the title of her second collection of poetry, Porch Light, whose eponymous poem quotes Tom Waits in the epigraph: ‘How do the angels get to sleep when the Devil leaves the porch light on?’
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ivy Ireland, Lucy Van
Lucy Van Reviews Michelle Leber
Medical diagnosis could be thought of as a form of storytelling; an analytic as well as creative process that translates the unclear expressions of the body into a plausible narrative, ideally one that directs the way to healing. Just as diagnosis might be con-sidered an art – a speculative performance that is highly contingent, at times inspired or risky – the discipline of medical observation has itself often inflected and animated art forms.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Gustave Flaubert, Lawrence Rothfield, Lei Zu, Lucy Van, Michelle Leber, Qi Bo
How Poems Work: Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ‘God of Unfulfilled Longings’
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of pop music. And I’ve been hearing really abstract arrangements, huge production, and big, inescapable metaphors.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Elizabeth Bachinsky, Lucy Van
Lucy Van Reviews John Mateer
In his two most recent books, the prolific John Mateer presents work developed over the long haul. His concluding essay in Unbelievers is a reflection on the seven years of writing behind that body of work, and Emptiness emphasises in its subtitle the 14-year scope of that collection. Despite the years of writing they represent, both collections bear a freshness of focus, expressed through Mateer’s formulation: ‘the irony of Elsewhere’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Mateer, Lucy Van
Review Short: Luke Fischer’s Paths of Flight
In Shakespeare’s last great poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle, the owl is banished from the allegorical proceedings of the bird funeral:
But thou, shrieking harbinger, Foul pre-currer of the fiend, Augur of the fever's end, To this troop come thou not near
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Lucy Van, Luke Fischer
Review Short: Andrew Sant’s The Bicycle Thief & Other Poems
It’s no current reference, but reading Andrew Sant’s recent collection, The Bicycle Thief, Andrew McGahan’s Praise springs to mind. When I studied McGahan’s novel, a more astute student than I pointed out that Gordon’s only romantic relationship was with his car, and that, accordingly, his only romantic response was towards the sad demise of that Holden.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Andrew Sant, Lucy Van
