Nathanael O’Reilly



SUBURBIA Editorial

Suburbia is often perceived to be artistically peripheral and yet it is also entrenched as the focal point of Australian cultural hegemony. After all, Australia has been the most suburban nation on earth since the late nineteenth century.

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Submission to Cordite 84: SUBURBIA

SuburbiaSend us your latest and greatest poems about the suburbs, the immense variety of life therein, and whether your suburban experience is inner, outer, middle-belt, beachside, exclusive, inclusive, multicultural, bogan, hipster or something else together.

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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.

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Nathanael O’Reilly Reviews Angela Costi and Dimitris Tsaloumas

Angela Costi’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many venues, including Cordite Poetry Review, The Age, Going Down Swinging, Overland, and Southerly. She has also published non-fiction prose and written seven plays. Costi’s new chapbook, Lost in Mid-Verse, is her fourth collection of poetry, following Dinted Halos (2003), Prayers for the Wicked (2005) and Honey and Salt (2007).

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Well Tempered

Prelude: Instructions for Travel When facing a veritable quandary insert hormone pellets Gather the mob at the bicycle assembly point Wish for a book at Powell’s locate fancy beasts, a mosquito cry hallelujah! then blackout Imagine noir script starring woman …

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Nathanael O’Reilly Reviews The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and Searching for The Man From Snowy River

The son of Irish immigrants, C.J. Dennis was born in South Australia in 1876. He died in Victoria in 1938, having become Australia’s most popular poet during his lifetime. Dennis’ first collection, Backblock Ballads and Other Verses (1913), was not a commercial success, but Dennis’ second collection, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, first published by Angus & Robertson in 1915, arguably became the most popular book of poetry ever published in Australia.

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At the Hair Salon in Big Sandy, Texas

A warm stomach rests on my arm. Breasts squish against my shoulder blades. Fingers fold back my ears, gently but firmly lift my chin. The clippers’ power cord tightens against my neck, stretches across to the outlet. Without my glasses, …

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Enter Cordite Scholarly

Cordite Scholarly is a new section of Cordite Poetry Review devoted to peer-reviewed research on Australian and international poetry and poetics. Essays published in Cordite Scholarly are reviewed by at least two members of Cordite’s Academic Advisory Board (or see …

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Russian Daughters

We stayed up all night with the daughters of Russian immigrants, lounging by the fire in hobo coats and corduroy trousers, listening to The Cure in the dark, talking until dawn, watching the sun rise over the bay. After sunrise, …

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