Author: Southerly

Guilty Pleasures (Lights Out! Meet in the kitchen in one hour for a Midnight Feast!)

Kate Middleton While I often deny the word “guilty” in relation to pleasures, I admit the phrase has its attractions and, yes, usefulness. A guilty pleasure has a little subversive thrill embedded, and is often something enjoyed when we feel we “should” be doing something else. That feeling of “should” could come from an awareness that we are procrastinating, but just as often I’m sure it comes from the idea that we could be spending our time on something with greater seriousness. One of my teachers and friends, the wonderful fiction and non-fiction writer Sugi Ganeshananthan, once said, “Guilt is…

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Brave New World: High-Tech Words

Kate Middleton In a recent edition of the New Yorker, television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about the television show The Good Wife. As television shows produced for the major free-to-air networks in the United States go, The Good Wife is remarkably grown-up: the adults act like adults, with nuanced, contradictory opinions and mannerisms, the parents behave like parents, and the few teenagers that appear on the show act maddeningly like teenagers. The search for the grown-up is not a new phenomenon in this time of teen-oriented media saturation: Virginia Woolf famously declared George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch “one of the few…

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Errata 71.2, A Handful of Sand

We have been notified of a number of errors and omissions in Southerly 71.2 A Handful of Sand.  Please find the corrections below and accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience. Correction for Kerry Reed-Gilbert and bios for Jannali Jones and Brenda Saunders* Full text for Natalie Harkin, White Picket Fence Full text for Brenda Saunders, Looking for Bulin Bulin* *These items may have been lost when our site went down in 2021. We are endeavouring to relocate missing files and return them to where they belong. Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have a copy you previously…

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The Lives of Other Writers

Kate Middleton While our literary commentators are often pronouncing the forthcoming obsolescence of the novel or poetry (Can Poetry Matter? Dana Gioia asks and everyone wrings their hands again…), one form that seems to be in no danger is the biography. We never get tired of talking about the way we live, and wondering if it’s the right way. Many of us turn to biographies for examples of right and wrong turns, as well as for a particularized vision of an era or a milieu that interests us: they make very palatable history lessons. The genres of biography and memoir…

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Our next guest blogger, Kate Middleton!

Thanks to Kate Livett and Toby Fitch for a great start to the year. Our next guest posts will be from Kate Middleton. You can read her bio below.   Kate Middleton is the author of Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009), awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, and shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year in Poetry. From September 2011-September 2012 she is the inaugural Sydney City Poet. She completed her BA/BMus at the University of Melbourne, and also holds an MA from Georgetown University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she was won Hopwood Awards…

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Poetry Titillations Part 2

Toby Fitch Here are some more forthcoming Australian poetry titles to get into a state about. It’s difficult to be comprehensive when compiling a list about the future, especially when that future is poetic, and extra-especially given that poetry publishers, thankfully, aren’t as media-hungry as politicians. So, there are more books in the works without titles or funding yet, but they’ll be a nice surprise when they flash us later in the year. NB: If any publishers want to add to this list, feel free to contact me or use the comments field below. Australian Poetry: Mathew Abbott — wild…

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Poetry Titillations

Toby Fitch I’ve decided to compile a list of forthcoming Australian poetry titles to give readers and reviewers a gander at the goose that is 2012. It’s not exactly complete. Some publishers haven’t written back to me and others have been a bit peeky, too shy to bare all. And fair enough: they’re all independent. Not like those big publishing houses who don’t do poetry. Anyway, mine is a knee-length skirt of a list, covering new works by poets who haven’t released anything in a while, a few New & Selecteds and Collecteds, and some first books by emerging poets.…

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Adelaide launch at the Spirit Festival of Southerly 71.2 A Handful of Sand

Please come to the Spirit Festival launch of Southerly 71.2 A Hand of Sand, with local writers and readers from the Nunga community. There will be some refreshments provided, and the issue will be sold at the special launch price of $25. Where: The Spirit Festival, Mullawirraburka Park (Rymill Park), Rundle Street When: 11:30am, Sunday February 26th 2012 Website: www.thespiritfestival.com

Monkeys and Leopards

Toby Fitch I’m chuffed that Southerly has asked me to take on the role of poetry reviews editor. There are a couple of reasons for appointing a reviews editor dedicated to poetry: 1) to relieve some of the editing and commissioning burdens that fall on David Brooks, Elizabeth McMahon and Kate Lilley, and 2) to invigorate the poetry reviews section of the journal by commissioning more reviews. The aim now is to have as many new Australian poetry releases reviewed as possible. The most anticipated books will receive our attention, of course, but I also plan to expose readers of…

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Long Paddock for Southerly 72.1: Mid-century Women Writers

Southerly 72.1 is available to purchase here. This link will take you to our old GumRoad storefront (an external site). Remaining issues will be moved to our own site, here, soon. POETRY Susan Adams, The Donation Didier Coste, Anonymous of troy SHORT FICTION Nicola Themistes, Hierology REVIEWS Michelle Borzi on Peter Steele, The Gossip and the Wine and Dan Disney, and then when the Joseph Cummins on Alex Miller, Autumn Laing Laura Joseph on Amy T Matthews, End of the Night Girl Emma Wortley on S. D. Gentill, Chasing Odysseus Andrew J. Carruthers on Catherine Vidler, Furious Triangle Heather Taylor…

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Dinner

Kate Livett Not a little fit, not a little fit sun sat in shed more mentally. Let us why, let us why weight, let us why winter chess, let us why way. … — Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914). Utterly different from its use by Gertrude Stein in Modernist experimental poetry, ‘fit’ has become a pop culture word of the 2010s, meaning the ‘fit’ between product and consumer, between organisation and employee, between equally ridiculous celebrities. Give us some examples, you say? Okay. Some perfect ‘fits’: The Wiggles and small children. Apple computers and art/design students. Brad Pitt and Angelina…

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