- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith 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
Michelle Cahill
icarus in the gloaming
i cannot deny the sky was alluring as Instagram despite curfew, gulls flying south into torn edges of violet-hued clouds. the power of bigotry is a machinery, often brutal returning from naarm, almost touching the moon before the next cruelty-free …
Posted in 109: NO THEME 12
Tagged Michelle Cahill
Mangroves
We hear their voices echo across the estuary fathers, mothers, and children fishing, an old man with a cane walks up the steep track a lyre bird is scraping among the ferns Every imagined finch, and the whip bird’s call …
Posted in 107: LIMINAL
Tagged Michelle Cahill
and, i think to myself what a wonderful world
damaged like the stumps of burned trees barren as an opencut megamine plastic litter in the stomach of manatees the dull carapace, the cold-stunned loggerheads poachers targeting dehorned rhinos shanks in the noxious skin of the Murray-Darling sirens at dusk, …
Posted in 106: OPEN
Tagged Michelle Cahill
‘Myth is not merely decorative’: Prithvi Varatharajan Interviews Michelle Cahill
The subject of my interview with Cahill is her second book of poems, Vishvarūpa, which is a highly unusual book by a contemporary Australian poet. In Vishvarūpa Cahill reanimates figures from ancient Hindu mythology.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Michelle Cahill, Prithvi Varatharajan
The Fall
for my father Tibouchina, warm maple-leaf, elsewhere it is winter. My father standing at the doorway with a phlegmy cough in the damp basement flat, his gaze a despair, resignation, I fear before the rite of knowing. I take the …
Posted in 82: LAND
Tagged Michelle Cahill
Review Short: Michelle Cahill’s The Herring Lass
Michelle Cahill is well-known to contemporary Australian readers as a poet, editor and fiction writer. She is the winner of the 2017 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing (one of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards), the Val Vallis Award, and the Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted for other major prizes.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Michelle Cahill, Nathanael O'Reilly
Extimate Subjects and Abject Bodies in Australian Poetry
This wry poem by Pan Zijie addresses language and human bodies as mobilised subjects. An Australian-born Chinese poet, Zijie has written in relative obscurity since publishing his first book, Vostok. Reading his striking collection Beijing Spring, published in 2015 by Maninriver Press, I wonder why I am not familiar with his work. After some online enquiries I learn that Pan holds a master’s in creative writing from Macquarie University and that he completed a PhD on representations of Chinese masculinity in Australian literature. His first collection received positive imprimaturs from David Brooks, Marcelle Freiman and Michael Wilding but I could find not a single review.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Jamil Khader, Kavita Bhanot, Maria Tumarkin, Michelle Cahill, Pan Zijie, Paul Kane, Sandeep Parmar, Slavoj Žižek
Pirogue
A boy, I dreamed of being a captain in the ocean’s foreign policy, catching the fast currency, binding my pirogue with a rope to hold back the breakers. Listen, today a jazz singer drowned, the infringing Atlantic shipped pirates who …
Posted in 61: NO THEME III
Tagged Michelle Cahill
Proteaceae: A Chapbook Curated by Peter Minter
In January 2013 I visited the inaugural exhibition of the new Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, an eclectic and compelling collection of works curated by Gavin Wilson and entitled ‘Picturing the Great Divide: Visions from Australia’s Blue Mountains’. I stood for what seemed like an hour before John Wolseley’s wonderful ‘The Proteaceae of NSW and Argentina 1996’ – a water colour and pencil work that is part of his ongoing creative enquiry into geological and biological temporalities, and one which advances an intensely felt and thought aesthetic of deep trans-historical and trans-biological emergence.
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Ali Cobby Eckermann, Bonny Cassidy, Jim Everett, Louise Crisp, Martin Harrison, Michelle Cahill, Natalie Harkin, peter minter, Stuart Cooke
Timothy Yu Reviews Contemporary Asian Australian Poets
A decade ago, Cordite Poetry Review asked me to write a review of its tenth issue, ‘Location: Asia-Australia.’ In my review, I wrote that while the issue did a splendid job of showing the intersection between two separate places called ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ it was less clear whether the ‘Asian-Australian’ could also be a thing unto itself, a kind of writing that might be visible within domestic as well as international spaces.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey, Michelle Cahill, Timothy Yu
The Vanishing
They hung me upside down by the tail, molecules starched— those Irish trackers, old-timers. I was tribal, a trophy locked with rigor mortis. They forced my abysmal jaw, my cough worthy of attention. I would make no apology for stray …
Posted in PROTEACEAE
Tagged Michelle Cahill
Interlude
It was school vacation, my daughter skiing with her father, my husband in board meetings, mynah birds drumming on the window panes, autumn gifts, my first ex. in a condo in Kuantan, (true friendships don’t crowd us, they are not …
Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC
Tagged Michelle Cahill
Day of a Seal, 1820
A tall ship patrols the coast, pelagic fish are vanishing. I sniff the kelp and bloodworms, mould into an eroded kerb with an akward wriggle of neck, whisking as if hiding my fur was natural as instinct for milk, or …
Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC
Tagged Michelle Cahill
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.
Flash Bulbs in the Dark: Women are Dynamite
The poetry canon does women few favours. Over the years, I’ve had to seek out and find my own choice femmes to balance out the bookshelves. Never feeling the pull of Plath or Dickinson, I went from Sappho to Aphra …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Alison Croggon, Claire Gaskin, GUNCOTTON, Helen Symonds, joanne burns, Michelle Cahill, Sarah French, women
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Michelle Cahill
Michelle Cahill’s second collection is marvellously named Vishvarūpa, Sanskrit for “manifold, having all forms and colours”. The cover is classic black and silver, with a close-up photograph of a Hindu deity’s sculpture. If the package says anything, it’s intelligent. And the package does not lie. Cahill may laze in the splendour of nature or love, as is the way with so many poets, but she does so with extensive layering.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Heather Taylor Johnson, Michelle Cahill
Five Sijo For My Raider (침입자를 위한 다섯 수의 시조)
Enemy, you have raided my country, your handwriting floats
Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK)
Tagged Kim Gaihyun, Michelle Cahill
Reading the Mahābhārata
Once in a ruptured past before mutiny or Midnight's Children,
Posted in 37: EPIC
Tagged Michelle Cahill
Angela Costi Reviews Poetry Without Borders
There is a deep sigh of relief when we come across Poetry Without Borders, an anthology willing to cross unknown terrain to bring us the voices of poets rarely heard. Whether it's due to language, cultural, economic or psychological factors, those poets who have migrated or are considered to be 'new arrivals' are hardly published.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Angela Costi, anthologies, Michelle Cahill, multiculturalism
