Cirrus@Austlit

'Theory of Colours takes as its title and point of departure the influential nineteenth-century treatise on colour by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. In Li’s third full-length collection, colour — and its absence — is at once subject, structural principle and medium. Moving from the distant past, through the fleeting, unstable present, and into a series of speculative futures, the book elaborates worlds both familiar and strange — a country estate, a small town, a grand hotel, a tower. Informed by the spectral practices of early photography and cinema, as well as the visual and thematic conventions of ghost stories, westerns and science fiction, Li’s narratives of text and image are unsettling explorations of sequence and time, absence and haunting.' (Publication summary)

'Not knowing how to start this editorial, I lazily google ‘belong’. A grossly simplified e-dictionary pops up to tell me that ‘belong’ comes from Middle English: ‘be-’ + an archaic form of ‘long’. But rather than investigate longen like the diligent researcher I should be, I am temporarily sidetracked; I think intensely about ‘being long’, consider stretching out on the ground, pointing my toes, elongating my spine, straightening my fingers. I think about being the longest me I can be.' (Jessica Wilkinson Editorial introduction)

'What could Australian poetry look like at the moment? It could look like any kind of poetry, like any language formed in (mostly) turning lines. It could look like a thousand things. Here, it looks like this: one big picture with countless moving parts. We think it's a good picture. We know it's not the only one, but it's a contribution to a conversation that's always carrying on beyond the moment.' (Bella Li and Jill Jones Foreword introduction)

Bella Li launches Kent MacCarter's California Sweet.