AustLit

The third annual anthology from Australian Poetry Limited.

'Every year, Australian Poetry publishes this anthology : a selection of poems from its subscribers. This anthology does not claim to define Australian poetry at large at this moment. It does aim to recognise and mark the organisation's vitality and range. Australian Poetry, with its thriving biannual journal, its national program of events, and its membership of nearly 1000, is now a community of poets of different ages, from different places, working in different styles. This book of 60 poems exists to bring that community together.' (Forword)

'What could Australian poetry look like at the moment? It could look like any kind of poetry, like any language formed in (mostly) turning lines. It could look like a thousand things. Here, it looks like this: one big picture with countless moving parts. We think it's a good picture. We know it's not the only one, but it's a contribution to a conversation that's always carrying on beyond the moment.' (Bella Li and Jill Jones Foreword introduction)

'In ‘they rise’ Jazz Money, a Wiradjuri poet and filmmaker addresses the future of the stolen lands we call Australia as a proud blak woman (Cordite, February 2021). Her voice rises above inferiority, trauma or shame. The poem is defiant, a wry celebration of the same bodies that colonialism makes ambivalent and abject by enabling its ‘superior’, cis-gendered whiteness:

turns out the future is technicolour blak black brown turns out we’re all welcome here queer brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings if you been here since the first sunrise or if you come here now just now come here heart open come here hurt from those wars and those sea levels rising

How do we turn out poetry that shows we are all welcome here? How do we collectively transpose settler privilege and oppressive hierarchies and why does it matter? What is wrong with a received system of naming, making categories and borders, if our hallowed aesthetics are tone deaf and mute to the sound of blak, brown and hybrid bodies breaking, dying, suffering? Listen to the poems here: we are suffering not merely because our tears matter less, or are less visible in the capitalist settler colony, but also because there are families that have been wartorn, assimilated and broken; there are forests that have been denuded, oceans pillaged and polluted, sacred sites mined, vestiges appropriated and rebranded, and all of this touches us multifariously, yet still, our protest is being silenced.' (Lucy Dougan Michelle Cahill Foreword introduction)