Chuffed to have a couple of new pantoums—‘Persian Love Cake’ (with a phrase from The Sugarcubes ‘Birthday’) and ‘Moon speaks during Pasur’ (with a phrase from Robert Dessaix’s What Days Are For)—in Southerly Persian Passages alongside writing by Cassandra Atherton, Niloofar Fanaiyan, Mike Greenacre, Matt Hetherington, John Kinsella, Jennifer Mackenzie, George Mouratidis, Hasti Nariyan, Melinda Louise Smith, Robert Wood and Ali Zarrin. Thanks to co-editors Ali Alizadeh and Laetitia Nanquette.

Details about Queensland Poetry Festival 2017 are emerging at QPF’s website.

QPF’s five awards—the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem; the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript; the Arts Queensland XYZ Prize for Innovation in Spoken Word; the Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Award; the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize—are now open.

I’m thrilled to be co-judging, with Michelle Cahill, the Val Vallis Award; we look forward to reading your poems!

Congratulations to Ali Cobby Eckermann, QPF’s Indigenous Poet in Residence!

The Arts Queensland Poet in Residence will be announced June 30, 2017.

Tincture Journal Issue 18 is out now and includes poetry by Peter Bakowski, Benjamin Dodds, Dave Drayton, Liam Ferney, Andrew Galan, Jill Jones, Rozanna Lilley, Felicity Plunkett, Mark Ward and Catherine Vidler.

You can read the full ToC here.

You can buy Issue 18 here.

Thrilled that one of my poems has been shortlisted for the Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Award 2017.

Congratulations to fellow shortlistees Alice Allan, Karen Andrews, David Arnault, Magdalena Ball, Brent Cantwell, Alyce Caswell, Benjamin ‘BMD’ Dodds, Rachel Hennessy, Judy Keighran, Sophia Laidlaw, Isabella Mead, Wendy Meyers, Jennifer Nguyen, Damen O’Brien, Michael Olsen, Jenny Pollack, Joan Ray, Alex Skovron, Iona Julian-Walters and Mitchell Welch.

Thanks to judges Helen Lucas, Steve Smart and Karen Throssell.

The winner will be announced at the Literary Nillumbik Celebration on 29 July at Eltham Library. In the meantime, you can read some ekphrastic poems at Cordite Poetry Review.

Tincture Journal Issue 18, out 1 June, includes poetry by Peter Bakowski, Benjamin Dodds, Dave Drayton, Liam Ferney, Andrew Galan, Jill Jones, Rozanna Lilley, Felicity Plunkett, Catherine Vidler, and Mark Ward, as well as fiction by Craig Billingham, Craig Burnett, Kevin Del Principe, Irma Gold, Nick Marland, Anna Ryan-Punch, Stephen Smith, and Elizabeth Tan.

In the meantime, why not Buy a Tincture and/or Subscribe.

‘The landscape of memory, as captured in Barnes’s collection, is not a flat surface on which easy markers are sprinkled, but a forested space with lush recollections that—in themselves—are mirrors of observed realities. … The poems in Glasshouses […] do not engage by way of commentary, but through a controlled formation of the environments that demand the reader’s intellectual investment.’

Warm thanks to Timothy Ogene—whose first novel The Day Ends Like Any Day launches 4 May, The Book Hive, Norwich—for this terrific, thoughtful review of Glasshouses.

Delighted that Glasshouses has been shortlisted for the 2017 Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) Mary Gilmore Award, to be given for the best first book of poetry published in the previous calendar year.

Congratulations to fellow shortlistees Carmine Frascarelli for Sydney Road Poems, Aden Rolfe for False Nostalgia, and Alison Whittaker for Lemons in the Chicken Wire, and thanks to the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award chair Michael Farrell and judges Ann Vickery and Justin Clemens.

The winner will be announced at the ASAL’s annual conference in Melbourne in July.

My poem ‘1992’ (released that year: The Cure’s Wish, Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History) has been published in Issue 1 of Impossible Archetype, founded and edited by Irish poet Mark Ward.

The issue, which you can download for free here, includes poems by Matthew Hittinger, Stephen S. Mills and Jay Whittaker, among others.

My poem ‘Aerial’, a terminal from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’ (you can read more about the terminal, a poetic form created by John Tranter, here), has been published in StylusLit, edited by Rosanna Licari. The issue also includes Alison Clifton’s review of Glasshouses:

‘Barnes is a master of the recurring image … snakes, birds, eyes, the moon, glasshouses, and medication all resurface at different moments. … Images jump from the page like a rockstar leaping from the stage into the seething mosh pit below … Barnes’s lines at once seethe with the fire of passion and glow with the warmth of compassion. This is powerful poetry.’

Also in this issue are poems by Zenobia Frost, Stu Hatton and Jo Langdon, and reviews of Félix Calvino’s So Much Smoke, Carmen Leigh Keates’ Meteorites and Ellen van Neerven’s Comfort Food.

Thanks to Rosanna and Alison.