how to launch a poem

About the author

Grace Yee

Grace Yee’s collection Chinese Fish won the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Mary and Peter Biggs...

More from this edition

Non-fictionSocial media has made available to us whole new audiences and vectors for class and lifestyle performance. Where previously your political commitments or what books you were reading might have been topics of conversation with close friends at the pub, now they can be projected to hundreds or thousands of followers. Eating at a restaurant is another example; a previously private and intimately social act can now be a place to be seen, not by the people you’re dining with, or even the other patrons, but by everybody who follows you.

The inspirations of radical nostalgia

Non-fictionEnvironmentalism, like history, is a civic discourse that critically engages with change in the world, contemplates the nature of limits and challenges ahistorical self-absorption. Like all good historians, environmentalists create recognition that the structures and conditions of today are not natural, inevitable or preordained but thoroughly contingent. The study of history and ecologically motivated advocacy also both demand reasoned scepticism towards the ideological claims of the powerful.

Put your house in order

In Conversation Poet, performer and musician Pascalle Burton has always been compelled by the visual possibilities of language and the imaginative dynamism of collage. Her multimodal...