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'As we sit down to write this introduction it’s reaching the end of winter in Geelong (Djilang), on unceded Wadawurrung Country – close to a year since we first considered the issue and its theme with Cordite’s Kent MacCarter. OPEN. What to say? Wattle’s blossoming in the park; magnolias are opening along suburban streets.1 The pandemic isn’t over, even if lockdowns have ended and, for many, masks are no longer. The government has changed, though as Behrouz Boochani wrote recently, in fundamental ways so-called Australia remains unaltered, seemingly unwilling to imagine itself anew. And so – amid continued violence across parts of the world including Ukraine, Gaza, and this colony – our approach to ‘Open’, at least thematically, remains an ironic, uneasy one.' (Jo Langdon and Cameron Lowe : Editorial introduction)
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Everything I Don’t Know How to Say / Sve što Ne Znam Kako Da Kažem,
single work
criticism
'When I left Bosnia in 2018, my cousin gave me a book of poetry, Bosansko-Hercegovačka Poezija. It’s a slim volume, bright purple with a pale lilac square on its cover. From it, a woman sketched in dark blue, a wide-eyed and startled dove at her breast, stares out. It was published in 1983, and is soft with its years and the hands that have held it. I still haven’t read it. I can’t speak Bosnian. Or rather: I couldn’t. Or perhaps: I can’t speak it well enough for this. When we left Bosnia, we left the language too. I was five and naš jezik became simply: a language. Not mine. Definitely not ours.' (Introduction)
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‘It’s No Gift to Have This Kind of Knowledge’ : Indigo Perry in Conversation with Dani Netherclift,
Indigo Perry
(interviewer),
Dani Netherclift
(interviewer),
single work
interview
'Indigo Perry and Dani Netherclift are sisters living and writing in Victoria. Their father and older brother both drowned in an irrigation channel in 1993. Below is a conversation about the ways that this tragedy has shaped their creative practices both singularly and in dialogue with each other’s work. This exchange highlights how the intangibility of grief potently forms an invaluable insight into a how their experiences are forced upon their understanding of writing and poetics. Such an exchange trusts the reader to embrace their account tenderly when considering how to challenge elegiac traditions.' (Introduction)
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Notes From Sick Rooms,
single work
poetry
'Notes from Sick Rooms is a poetic erasure of a Victorian nursing manual published in 1883 for the home-nurse at a time before public health provisions, before mass hospitalisation and the widespread use of anti-biotics. The most that could be done for the ill (who is always referred to in the manual using the female pronoun) was to keep ‘her’ comfortable, clean and pacified at home. The resulting text provides a marvellously florid voice of the invalid, domestically confined woman of the nineteenth century that Gilbert and Gubar famously called ‘The Mad Woman in the Attic’.' (Introduction)
- Uncertain Partsi"In my notebook, I record you each in different", single work poetry
- My Raucous, Singing Ear, sequence poetry
- On the Traini"I’m sitting on a blue seat, two red ones in front of me and a sign above them illustrating what priority seating", single work poetry
- In the Cari"Today I can drive. Yesterday I could not. The steering wheel in my hands is warm as victory. Driving can", single work poetry
- At the Butcheri"I have three children, fair, pale and risen lean, and I’m always buying chicken, what it means to be a mother", single work poetry
- At the Supermarketi"I have avoided supermarkets for three months now. The physio says it is very normal for people in my", single work poetry
- At Homei"I am couch-sprawled, pinch of lower back and hips because I twist my body outlandishly, a comfort that’s", single work poetry
- At Homei"I open the front door, smell the familiar woody aroma of home, feel warmth enveloping me. Home is a place", single work poetry
- Joy to My Worldi"here is the pleasure kitty-cat warm", single work poetry
- ECT Tree, single work poetry
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Porous Walls, or, Why Don’t You Join Me?: Poems from the Future of Health,
Andy Jackson
,
sequence
poetry
poetry
'In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart writes that the use of caesura or enjambment ‘bring[s] pulse and breath to the poem itself’, at the same time opening ‘the text to the excentric positions of unintelligibility and death’.' (Introduction)
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Writing Threat and Trauma : Poetic Witnessing to Social Injustice and Crisis,
single work
criticism
'This article explores creative responses to crises that are written and technologically mediated in a liminal zone between threat and trauma. In considering how poetic texts witness social injustice-related crises – henceforth referred to as social justice-crisis – I posit that this liminal zone produces a different kind of witnessing than the post-traumatic witnessing traditionally associated with literary trauma testimony, and as such, it is an emergent 21st century mode of witnessing and testimony.' (Introduction)
- Tongue of the Hiddeni"She reads Tongue of the Hidden,", single work poetry
- Reali"Craig Henderson. You are the most attractive real estate agent in the region. When 47 year old Jessica and I", single work poetry
- Three Elegies, sequence poetry
- Topography (31-10-20)i"Westgarth 11-25 a.m.", single work poetry
- Topography 22/11/21 Northcotei"All Nations Park back", single work poetry