Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)