- 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
Robert Wood
Peripheral Peripheries: Robert Wood on Alvin Pang
Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alvin Pang, Robert Wood
Johanna Featherstone Reviews History and the Poet
Although Robert Wood’s History and the Poet is described as essay, it defies being labelled as one genre. Perhaps like the definition of poetry itself, which shifts and changes between individuals and contexts, language and culture, so do Wood’s words.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Johanna Featherstone, Robert Wood
Wembley Food Court
Intent on wonton destruction we fought streets combatted mortality thieved grandness from auto-tuned oysters. They sung out our numbers saucy asked and the sambal yams awaited deliverance. We forgot the steam shucked corn the color of lions drank nettle tea …
Posted in 84: SUBURBIA
Tagged Robert Wood
Review Short: Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men
From the title of Shane Rhodes’s collection Dead White Men, we know we are in fraught if familiar territory. Those men are the subjects to be critiqued, argued with, taken down in light of today’s history.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Robert Wood, Shane Rhodes
Review Short: Homer Rieth’s The Garden of Earth
You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Australia’ was simply this place, rather than an imagined community. It is of course not only a phantasm or a figment that is whole, but also real and divisible.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Robert Wood
Language Barriers
Many live after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E then, but few live as it. There is no comparable, or adequate, rupture precisely because there is a lack of Historical, and philosophical, work being done. Cue the misunderstanding of what to radically break with.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Robert Wood
The New Reality in Australian Poetry
The generation of Murray is not my generation. The generation of Adamson is not my generation either. Nor is it Tranter or Kinsella.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Albert Tucker, Bonny Cassidy, Corey Wakeling, David Unaipon, Dorothy Hewett, luke beesley, Robert Wood
snake-well : a suite of wheatlands poems
i. ash loam and foot flesh farm-bones and skin maps pink, grey, graveground, form-grasses and wavetaints wellbaked and seed black ii. starlows the cropframe saltcanvas of generation, plateau waist the size of place iii. tigerhand by jokebite, and fivethink of …
Posted in 72: THE END
Tagged Robert Wood
Robert Wood Interviews Alan Loney
I first met Alan Loney at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. I was studying there at the time and Alan had been invited as a guest of Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Alan Loney, Charles Olson, Max Gimblett, Robert Creeley, Robert Wood
Review Short: Omar Musa’s Parang
Omar Musa is something of a phenomenon. I mean that both in the demotic and the philosophical senses. Self-publisher, author of the successful novel Here Come the Dogs (longlisted for the Miles Franklin), lyricist with international hip hop outfit MoneyKat, Wikipedia subject. As demonstrated by the author photo in this book Parang, autobiographical promotional videos (‘Live and Direct from Kingsley’s Chicken’), comparisons to Junot Diaz and his sartorial style, Musa has made a career from ‘the street’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Omar Musa, Robert Wood
Cruel Buffoonery
In the North American summer of 2015 I journeyed into the heart of the MFA industrial complex.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Charles Bernstein, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, John Kinella, Robert Wood
Review Short: Daneen Wardrop’s Cyclorama and Terrence Chiusano’s on generation and corruption
About a decade ago ‘trauma’ became an industry in the academic literary critical economy. This was due in part to the success of Cathy Caruth, but there were other theorists that mattered before and after (Freud’s ‘repetition compulsion’ and Elaine Scarry’s body in pain). Holding hands with trauma was ‘witness’. Of course, witnessing has been in the discourse for a long time as well, but there was a steady growth in its paradigmatic quality after the Holocaust industry began to develop more fully (see Norman Finkelstein).
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Daneen Wardrop, Robert Wood, Terrence Chiusano
Review Short: Amelia Dale’s Metadata and Thalia’s A Loose Thread
The question what are we to do at and with the limits of language presents itself as the central question in the two books under review here. That they frame themselves as poetry means that the context in which this occurs is different from art or graphic design – two fields into which both could easily be placed. One does not ‘read’ these works but apprehends them.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Amelia Dale, Robert Wood, Thalia
Robert Wood in as Commissioning Editor
I am pleased to announce that Robert Wood has joined the Cordite Poetry Review masthead as a Commissioning Editor. Shortly, we’ll start a series of critical essays from Australian and international writers, about one a month. This is in addition …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Robert Wood
Review Short: Shane McCauley’s Trickster
It is something of a paradigm in literary criticism (poetics included) to couple West Australians with place. Of late Tim Winton and John Kinsella have occupied this ground, but it is there in thinking about Randolph Stow and Dorothy Hewett and many more besides. It was Winton, after all, who wrote – ‘we come from ‘the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere”. The place, thought of quite literally as location, is simply ‘wrong’, meaning not quite right, meaning askew. This is to say nothing of the spirit here, or how, for a great number of people (some Noongars and others included), this always was and always will be the very centre of the world.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Robert Wood, Shane McCauley
Review Short: Ian Gibbins’s and Judy Morris’s Floribunda
How far we are from the radical days of realism. Prior to Adorno’s dismantling of Lukacs and the Stalinist led state institutionalisation of it, realism may have laid claim to being an innovative aesthetic with agreeably progressive political inclinations.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ian Gibbins, Judy Morris, Robert Wood
Robert Wood Reviews Duncan Hose, Jean Kent and Alyson Miller
In the library of Australian poetry animals occupy many pages. There are poems on kangaroo, frog, platypus and bandicoot; pig, dog, possum and cow; sheep, fox, dugong and crocodile; and an aviary of birds from budgies and pelicans to magpies and herons.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alyson Miller, Duncan Hose, Jean Kent, Robert Wood
