'When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?
How do you know you're not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia, stagnation’
'So asked Adrienne Rich, documenter of exiles, revolutionaries and the twentieth century. Too often, our response to uncertainty and impending apocalypse is that we must save this world - a world of yearning for counterfeit yesterdays and rehabilitated tomorrows. Or worse, for things to continue as they are, as we have come to believe they have always been; a world we are told is ‘already great’, ad nauseam.' (Jacinda Woodhead, Editorial Introduction)
Other works not individually indexed include:
– It is still the Balanda way by Amy Thomas
– On the unbearable closeness of others by Giovanni Tiso
– ‘Law and order’ by CJ Chanco
– All worlds die by Angus Reoch
– The quest for primordial whiteness by Ramon Glazov
– Symptoms of stasis by Rory Dufficy
– To be a queer teacher by Elizabeth Sutherland
– Lost objects by Andrew Dean
– A consequence of things by Nigerian writer Afopefoluwa Ojo
'Today I read that you had died.
'I can’t stop the ache in my throat, the breaking pressure in my chest, even though you are no more absent to me now than you have ever been. I only knew you through your writing: novels, essays, poems – and once a letter, written in blue biro on the back of a bill, in response to one of mine.' (Introduction)
'It has been a pleasure and an honour to judge the 2016 Judith Wright Prize for Emerging Poets. While reading the entries, we kept in mind Wright’s words on the central cultural role poetry plays:
I think poetry should be treated, not as a lofty art separated from life, but as a way of seeing and expressing not just the personal view, but the whole context of the writer’s times.
(Introduction)
