Ali Jane Smith

Hot Composting

Wild Curious Air finds its material in what has come before, digs into the turbulence and profusion of the present, and propagates the demand that we attend to the reality and urgency of this moment.

Poems to Paint on a Wall

Borderless is not ‘Australian’ or even ‘Australian Feminist Poetry’ – it’s transnational. Not international. Transnational – borderless. Most of these poets live on this continent, but not all. I should probably relax and let myself be confused ab...

Where Do We Park?

Bodies get hungry, and I’m at the table, telling birth stories, and so is LK Holt, and so is Astrid Lorange. We don’t always agree, but at last we’re talking loud enough for everyone to hear, and join in the conversation. We’re talking about the b...

A Break That Can Be Bridged

Since I started work on this review, I’ve resisted turning it into an essay about the kindness movement. Felicity Plunkett’s poetry deserves our full attention. But the book is called A Kinder Sea, and as I’ve been reading and re-reading these poe...

Reading apparently

The pregunta’s cube sits in my imagination. It has begun to take on a meaning, a meaning that says, remember what you’re reading here Ali, it’s a poem by Joanne Burns, it can’t be translated, unlocked, puzzled out. It’s not for solving. It’s for r...

A Book Is A Good Place To Think

It has at times been distressing to witness the media coverage of Kate and Rozanna Lilley’s story, as the intelligence, courage and nuance of their own accounts are temporarily obscured by blunt angles and agendas, by media interest driven in part...

Becoming Fay Zwicky

For most people, the great adventures of their lives are births, love affairs, illnesses, bereavements, starting businesses or changing jobs. Insights into our selves and our loved ones come through the difficult enough business of living together...

Hot Links: Hypertext and George P. Landow

Plain Text, Real Time

The invention of electronic mailing lists made it possible for Australian poets to talk to poets from everywhere, and to talk to each other.

And so say all of us: joanne burns and you

‘joanne burns keeps language moving, and her shifts between first and second person are part of that ceaseless motion. She makes that second person work for her, effortlessly ploughing, turning up the unexpected. She writes in third person too, bu...

The Way Home: Laurie Duggan

It's almost thirty years since The Ash Range was first published. Things change, politically and personally, in thirty years.