I’m delighted to be guest co-editing Cordite 88: TRANSQUEER with Quinn Eades.

TRANSQUEER is a call for you to say something that maybe you haven’t been able to say before. It asks you to find poetry in / between lines, binaries and stultifying categorisations; from the life of flesh, from inside the bleating, many-chambered heart of gender and sexuality. We want transgressive poems, transonic poems, transmontane poems. We think of a few lines from Sylvia Plath, ‘Balloons’ – ‘Yellow cathead, blue fish— / Such queer moons we live with / Instead of dead furniture!’ – and of their elegant translucence. Come into being. Send us your gasps, your yells, your manifestos, your moments in the mirror – say something. Send us your work, and ask us to believe it, weeping. The time for TRANSQUEER poetry is here.

Submissions close 11.59pm Melbourne time on Sunday, 5 August.

Full guidelines here.

Happy to have a poem alongside new work by some of my favourite people and poets, including Jarad Bruinstroop, Quinn Eades, Zenobia Frost, Angela Gardner, Rebecca Jessen, Jill Jones, Kate Lilley, Antonia Pont and Stephen J. Williams et al., in the Michael Farrell-edited LGBTQIA+ Issue of Rabbit, to be launched by Michael on Friday 18 May, 6–8pm, Gleebooks, Glebe (RSVP here). Hope some of you Sydney folk can make it!

Happy World Poetry Day!

I’ve a new poem, about growing up gay in 80s and 90s Tasmania, in Stilts Journal Issue 1, alongside work by R.A. Briggs, Lachlan Brown, Broede Carmody, Shastra Deo, Quinn Eades, Liam Ferney, Mindy Gill, Jill Jones, John Kinsella, Caitlin Maling, Ellen van Neerven, Damen O’Brien and Fiona Wright.

Congratulations to Stilts’ editors Ella Jeffery, Emily O’Grady and Zenobia Frost on the launch of this terrific new poetry journal and thanks for publishing ‘In Heaven I’ll be quite normal (, or Pentina to Doone Kennedy, after The Smiths)’.

Pleased to have a new poem, ‘Chalicento’ (a cento from Ern Malley), in Marrickville Pause Issue 3: Spiel, edited by Jake Goetz. Jake’s also included two poems that were first published in Glasshouses: ‘ENDONE^® Oxycodone hydrochloride 5 mg’ (a remix of ENDONE Oxycodone hydrochloride’s CMI) and ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ (a remix of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Rabbit Catcher’).

You can read all three, plus writing by Ken Bolton, Pam Brown, Nick Chlopicki, Toby Fitch, Walter Gabriel, Duncan Hose, Cath Kenneally, Melody Paloma, Eva Philips and Kelly Poole, here.

Three new poems have recently gone online:

‘senescencento’, at Plumwood Mountain, guest edited by Michael Farrell;

‘Double Acrostic’, at Cordite, guest edited by Lachlan Brown and Nathanael O’Reilly;

‘From Nonets’, at Overland, edited by Toby Fitch.

These issues also include poems by Lisa Brockwell, Eileen Chong, Carmine Frascarelli, Jill Jones, Chris Lynch, Alvin Pang, Jonno Revanche, Michele Seminara and Jessica L Wilkinson.

Warm thanks to Magdalena Ball for reviewing Glasshouses so generously:

a powerful debut full of tight craftsmanship, and decentred, multi-vocalled poems that combine a temporal urgency and emotional drama with rhythm, form, structure and a creative ‘uncreativity’ that is both delicate and powerful. Sonnets, villanelle, sestina, found poems, acrostics, and remixes all reference one another and themselves, shifting through an unreliable lens of memory, self-awareness, changing identity, and a progression that works not so much from youth to age but from naivety to understanding.

You can read Magdalena’s full review here.

I’m delighted to be appearing in two events at Perth Festival Writers Week 2018: GLASSHOUSES (a conversation with Vivienne Glance about my poetry collection Glasshouses and borrowed word-worlds) and POETRY LAND I (a reading with Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Caroline Abbs, Tineke Van der Eecken and Corey Wakeling).

Tickets for these and other Perth Festival Writers Week 2018 events are on sale now.

Huge thanks to guest curator William Yeoman and to everyone at University of Queensland Press.

I had a blast putting this playlist together.

‘GLASSHOUSES: Songs from the poetry collection and then some’, featuring The Cure, Nick Drake, Ofra Haza, Abel Korzeniowski, Low, Pulp, Squarepusher, etc, is available now on Spotify.

Happy listening!

Warm thanks to Joseph Schreiber for writing about Glasshouses so thoughtfully:

[This] is a collection that feels intensely intimate and personal, in the sense that Barnes seems to be engaging directly with his reader, sharing his love of the poets who have guided him, directly or through his careful reading, drawing inspiration from his family and from his own experience as a gay man, and openly riffing on the influence of music and pop culture. The wide range of voices that emerge, together with the variety afforded by his delight in structure and form, allows for a reading experience that never falls into tired and predictable patterns.

And here’s Joe on the cento (my book includes five):

If a line that catches me short in a cento actually originates from another work, who owns the power? The poet who crystalized the image, or the poet who re-envisions it, a jewel among other salvaged (and fully credited) jewels? Or—and I should hope this is correct—both but in different ways?

You can read Joe’s full review here and buy a copy of Glasshouses here (use promo code CELEBRATE at checkout to receive free shipping, Australian and New Zealand shipping addresses only, offer ends midnight January 10).