Zoë Sadokierski



Introduction to Elena Gomez’s Body of Work

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Fiona Hile

There’s a difference between occupying a seemingly unceasing parade of subject positions through a kind of colonising, thieving, dissipatory borderlessness … and inhabiting them as a form of aesthetic and political revolt.

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Introduction to Helen Lambert’s Echoland

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Ken Bolton

Helen Lambert’s work is as new to me as it will be to others – she has been operating away from Australian poetry for some time, with long periods in Ireland and, lately, Russia. One approaches a new poet warily. Yet the inventive and capable intelligence behind the poems here is immediately apparent. It is wonderful to be able to drop one’s guard, to forget it – and to enter a wonderful world.

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Introduction to Siobhan Hodge’s Justice for Romeo

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Dennis Haskell

Justice for Romeo, as a title, will seem both accurate and misleading for most readers; this is a book decidedly concerned with justice, and Siobhan Hodge’s sense of ethical responsibility pervades the poems. Hodge’s book includes as epigraph the exchange between Romeo and a servant in Act I, Scene ii of the most famous love story of all time; the servant asks, ‘I pray, can you read any thing you see?’, to which Romeo replies, ‘Ay, if I know the letters and the language.’

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Introduction to Lindsay Tuggle’s Calenture

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Kate Middleton

Lindsay Tuggle’s poetry is uncomfortable to read: the discomforts one feels in reading her work are the very thing that make it memorable. At once immensely personal, ornate, and unapologetically embedded in female experience, it is a style unconcerned with irony or terseness. It is a verse informed by the still-alive alternative histories of the American South and haunted by the Southern Gothic literature that these histories inform.

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Introduction to Pascalle Burton’s About the Author Is Dead

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Bella Li

Pascalle Burton’s About the Author is Dead refers to, and opens with an epigraph from, Roland Barthes’s seminal essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Inside the collection, we find not one author but many: David Byrne and Grace Jones, Miranda July and Jacques Derrida; authors who are filmmakers, authors who are poets, philosophers and musicians.

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20 Poets, a Free Anthology from Cordite Books

Posted on October 5, 2017 by Kent MacCarter

The geographic barriers that can, at times, hinder Australian literature are no longer relevant, and poetry communities around the world must be enlightened by the commanding, demanding and exciting trajectory of contemporary Australian poetics.

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Introduction to Tony Birch’s Broken Teeth

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Stephen Muecke

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski Don’t think you’ll get away with lightly reading these Tony Birch poems. They are not just words whistling on the wind. They come laden with other gifts. With a whole place: Melbourne. With a long …

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Introduction to Jen Crawford’s Koel

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Divya Victor

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski The koel is called after its call – its name is onomatopoeic, from the Greek ὀνοματοποιία: ‘ὄνομα’ for ‘name’ and ‘ποιέω’ for ‘I make’. The koel becomes itself as it sings out and is heard …

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Introduction to Autumn Royal’s She Woke & Rose

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Maria Takolander

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski She Woke & Rose introduces us to a poet, Autumn Royal, who is unafraid to spark light in the darkest of places. The poems in this impressive debut collection illuminate the uneasy space of the …

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Introduction to Claire Nashar’s Lake

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Ann Vickery

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski In Lake, Claire Nashar navigates the connections between people and between person and place in a striking elegy not only for her grandmother, leading geology academic Beryl Nashar, but also for Tuggerah Lake, an estuary …

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Introduction to Javant Biarujia’s Spelter to Pewter

Posted on January 29, 2016 by berni m janssen

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski In Javant Biarujia’s poetry, language matters – matters as in important, and matter as a unifying substance, a material to be transformed, and in so doing, becomes transforming. Particles of language are pounded out, splintered, …

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Introduction to Rachael Briggs’s Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Felicity Plunkett

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski The polka originated in nineteenth-century Bohemia. A dance for two, it is reputedly simple to learn. Three steps and a hop, in fast duple time, with various steps – Turning Basic, Pursuit and Waltz Galop …

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The Sydney Launch of Harkin, Gibson, Loney and Hawke

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Peter Kirkpatrick

OBJECT: Australian Design Centre, Thursday 25 June, 2015 I’m pleased to say that I was at the launch of the very first issue of Cordite Poetry Review, way back in 1997. Good heavens, is that eighteen years ago? The journal …

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Cordite Book Launch: Loney, Gibson, Hawke, Harkin

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Justin Clemens

Collected Works Bookstore, Wednesday 6 May, 2015 I will begin with a bit of spontaneous resentful metaphysics. I am sorry to do so, for a number of reasons, but there we are. If it can be justified at all, it …

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Cordite Books

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Kent MacCarter

We’re pleased to tumble out into the world these first four print collections in the new Cordite Books imprint. We had considered print collections for a few years, but the tipping point to actually publish them came in late November …

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Introduction to Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Peter Minter


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

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Introduction to Ross Gibson’s Stone Grown Cold

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Pam Brown


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

The works that Ross Gibson has written and edited over the past thirty years could be classed as political aesthetics. In books like Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, chronicling the wretched historical miscreants of Queensland’s Brigalow country, or 26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788–1791, speculatively tracing English astronomer William Dawes’s scientific work and his relationship with the Indigenous Eora people of Sydney Harbour in a few late years of the eighteenth century, Ross Gibson’s method is procedural. Seven Versions and 26 Views form a compositional design that he has described as ‘fractal’, allowing unfixed multiple views and patterns. The author’s practice of creative fragmentation, applied to the poems and short prose pieces in this new collection, eschews linearity and dull chronology.

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Introduction to John Hawke’s Aurelia

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Gig Ryan


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

John Hawke’s forensic inquiries in this book are layered with casual erudition – Diderot, Czech poet Vladimir Holan – and locate the poem as transformative state. Many of these poems conclude with a mystical ascent into nature, reminiscent of Patrick White scenes in which the division between consciousness and the universe wavers, signifying that any reconciliation is epiphanic, claimed by art or religion. Yet nature belittles human effort – ‘The path to the point is marked by a scattering / of impermanent hand-made memorials’ – that is, the poet’s endeavours are precariously, though heroically, makeshift, overlaid; but nature is also that which threatens or devours, ‘digesting light’.

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Introduction to Alan Loney’s Crankhandle

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Michael Farrell


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

Since moving from New Zealand to Australia back in 2001, Alan Loney has carried on a prolific, internationally recognised career in Melbourne. Crankhandle, Loney’s latest published work, follows on from 2014’s chapbook collaboration with Max Gimblett, eMailing flowers to Mondrian, and the books from Five Islands Press, Nowhere To Go (2007) and Fragmenta Nova (2005). Borrowing his contemporary Laurie Duggan’s term, Loney can be read as a ‘late objectivist’: worrying at that particular American formal legacy, with its attendant philosophical and ethical concerns.

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Analogue Bodies: A Conversation with Tom Lee and Zoë Sadokierski

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Tom Lee

Analogue Bodies is a collection of essays by Tom Lee, materialised as set of illustrated books by Zoë Sadokierski. The project looks at different parts of, and events within, the human body and historical ways of depicting and making sense of them. It aims to humour and, on its day, to educate. It was presented as part of the recent Emerging Writers’ Festival 2014 at the Wheeler Centre.

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Emerging Writers Festival Workshop: The Book as Experimental Form, Emergent Structure (Live Action Test-Drive)

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Astrid Lorange

In conjunction with the Emerging Writers Festival, Cordite Poetry Review is chuffed to present a workshop led by Astrid Lorange. Location: The Wheeler Centre Time: 6.30pm-8.30pm Available spaces: 16 Book your free attendance here. Be snappy about it! There are …

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A Poetics of The Naughty

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Tom Lee

The word ‘naughty’ is etymologically related to the number naught. Winning, and its relationship to one, along with duplicity and its relationship to two, seem to be the only other similar contemporary instances where a number becomes descriptive of a particular kind of activity. But being naughty is not the opposite of winning, in the sense that winning is being number one.

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