'In late 2011, I had a meeting with the founders of the nonfictionLab at RMIT University, David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short. I was a new employee at the university, and they were asking me what I might contribute to the fledgling ‘Lab’. Without much thought, I proposed that the literary publication Rabbit, which I had begun as an experimental venture midway through the year, become ‘a journal for nonfiction poetry’. David and Francesca looked at me excitedly. ‘What’s nonfiction poetry?’, they asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and we all laughed at how swiftly an authoritative statement was revealed to be a mere spontaneous proposition. When the mood resumed to focus on serious business, I told them that we would find out.' (Introduction)
Epigraph: Poetry – amid all its ambiguity and ornamentation – is not only perfectly capable of conveying truth; it can also attain a unique relationship to truth because it implicitly acknowledges and interrogates the limitations of language.— Cole Swensen.