I loved guest co-editing Rabbit 32: FORM with Charmaine Papertalk Green. Thanks to everyone who sent poems (1100!). Hope you’ll enjoy the 30 we selected (for full list of contributors click here). Huge thanks to Jessica Wilkinson and Team Rabbit.

This issue features artwork by Brendan Fitzpatrick and includes First Nations Poetry selected by Jeanine Leane, interviews with Ebony Stewart and Elena Gomez, essays by Derek Beaulieu, Josie/Jocelyn Deane and Antonia Pont & Oliver Driscoll, reviews, Rabbit homework with Dave Drayton and more!

Order your copy here.

Congratulations to Ellen van Neerven, recipient of the 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowship for ‘Kweensland: Sovereign Bodies and the Colonial Nation-State’, and to shortlisted poets Anne Elvey, Benjamin Dodds, Brenda Saunders, Em König, Jill Jones, Sara Saleh, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Toby Fitch and Tricia Dearborn. Thanks to everyone who applied for the Fellowship, to fellow judges Jeanine Leane and Jessica Alice, and to Red Room Company.

You can read Ellen’s Statement (and our Judging Notes) here.

Happy World Poetry Day!

My recording of my poem ‘Off-World Ghazal’, inspired by Judith Wright’s ‘Black Cockatoos’ and shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2020, is now online.

You can listen to (and read) the poem here.

Massive congrats to 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowship shortlistees Anne Elvey, Benjamin Dodds, Brenda Saunders, Ellen van Neerven, Em König, Jill Jones, Sara Saleh, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Toby Fitch and Tricia Dearborn!

Huge thank you to everyone who applied as well as Red Room’s wonderful Tamryn Bennett and Annie Te-Whiu and fab fellow judges Jeanine Leane and Jessica Alice. You can read our judging notes and more about the shortlistees etc here.

The 2021 Fellow will be announced at 3pm AEDT on Sunday 21 March (World Poetry Day) as part of Red Room’s Poetry Month online launch. You can RSVP here.

Had a wonderful time reading with Benjamin Dodds and open micers at Sydney Poetry Lounge last night. Missed the live stream? You can watch the recording here. Thanks to Daragh Byrne and everyone who zoomed in.

Happy my poem ‘I really hope you’re doing okay (A decaying sestina for & after Benjamin Dodds)’ hopped into Rabbit’s SCIENCE issue alongside writing by Aidan Coleman, Benjamin Dodds, Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn, Angelica Esquivel, Gavin Yuan Gao, Dominique Hecq, Eric Jiang, Damen O’Brien and Alison Zheng et al. Thanks to guest-editor Tricia Dearborn and Editor-in-Chief Jess Wilkinson. 

You can order a copy here. 

Valued at $10,000, the Red Room Poetry Fellowship encourages Australian poets to undertake an intensive period of creative development involving a range of commissions, residency, recordings and publication outcomes. 

I’m honoured to be judging this year’s fellowship alongside Jessica Alice and Tony Birch. 

Applications close 5:00pm, Monday 22 February 2021.

On Wednesday February 17 from 7:30pm I’ll Zoom-read poems from Glasshouses and dear friend Benjamin Dodds poems from his brilliant second collection Airplane Baby Banana Blanket — we’ll read other poems too — for Sydney Poetry Lounge. Online only free event. Details and Zoom link here. Hope to see you!

Two bits of very lovely news! 

My ‘Sestina: Rape’, first published in The Moth Issue 42, was included in Banshee Lit’s Best of 2020 reading list by Irish poet Mark Ward and will be presented alongside American poet Patricia Smith’s ‘Ethel’s Sestina’ by professor of poetry and queer theory Stephen Guy-Bray in his book on line endings in Renaissance poetry, which will end with a discussion of contemporary poems.

My ‘Little Gilt’, a queer retelling/mash-up of Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and Marelle’s ‘The True History of Little Golden-Hood’, is a finalist in the 2021 NWF/joanne burns Microlit Award and will be published in its Pulped Fiction anthology. The shortlist and winners and details of the awards ceremony and book launch will be announced in early 2021.

Wishing everyone a peaceful end of the year! x

Thanks to Mark Roberts for publishing my launch speech of Benjamin Dodds’s brilliant second poetry collection Airplane Baby Banana Blanket (Recent Work Press) at Rochford Street Review. To read three poems from ABBB click here.