- 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
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
