Cirrus@Austlit

'William Blake’s articulation of the ‘bounding line’ as ‘the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life’ may seem a far-fetched place to start an examination of the poetics of the fence in Australian poetry. The line’s cosmic necessity and ethical force were being asserted by Blake in the context of a long-running dispute amongst art theorists as to whether outline or colour was the predominant element in the pictorial arts. But my mind reverts to this quotation when thinking about the cathected attitude to lines, boundaries, and fences that is emblematic of the settler-colonial establishment in this country in both its agrarian and suburban contexts.' (Introduction)

'Throughout this pandemic, I’ve been reading fiction to simulate going home to Florida. I read Ivy Pochoda’s sprawling Los Angeles novel Wonder Valley (2017) to replicate my layovers after flying into LAX, and Swamplandia! (2011) by Karen Russell to remember the smell of swampland and the tacky sadness of gift shop strip malls. I returned to Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot (2002) to relive the experience of buying a shrink-wrapped copy at the Scholastic Book Fair in the refrigerated library of my Central Florida elementary school. For 18 months I have used fiction for my own simulative purposes, as a game I can play to get home.'  (Introduction)

'On Instagram, old questions about sincerity and identity in the lyric voice meet new pressures from the digital attention economy. This collision has produced evolutions in form, but also prompted critical questions about the Instapoem’s commodification of selfhood and about the vexed categories of aspiration, representation, and authenticity in contemporary poetics.'  (Introduction)

'A bag of salt was a beginning. Tribal tattooed hands from another time, yet present beside me, reached in to a handbag and placed a small, well-travelled satchel on the table. We all stared at it. Her voice, an instrument of belonging, invited us to pinch some.' (Introduction)

'When Teena McCarthy told me she had constructed this book from poems, lines, phrases and images that she had written on odd-sized pieces of paper and had gathered them until they formed a manuscript, I immediately thought of Emily Dickinson, who also wrote many of her poems on the backs of envelopes and scraps that had been used as shopping lists. The connection is not far-fetched: McCarthy connects startling images to form intense visions that vibrate with arresting music.' (Introduction)

'‘A Special Starch’ is an excerpt from a collection that engages with stories told by – and about – early settler Chinese Australians and their descendants, with a particular focus on those who settled in Melbourne and regional Victoria. The poems were written with the assistance of a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria, 2019-21.' (Introduction)