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-fictionOne significant subset of our modern adult-safeguarding environment is elder abuse, which we know is a significant and under-reported problem. In 2021 the Australian Institute of Family Studies released the results from the first-ever broad survey of elder-abuse prevalence in Australia. This showed that 14.8 per cent of adults aged sixty-five and over had suffered abuse in the previous twelve months. Importantly, only a little more than one third of people who experienced abuse sought help.

Into the void

Non-fictionThe singular achievement of mass politics was allowing otherwise powerless individuals a greater say in how society was ruled. It gave ordinary people the kind of status that hitherto they could hardly imagine. Its withering away, therefore, has allowed those in society whose status has always been higher to assert their interests more fully. Business and the wealthy are no longer forced to make big compromises to accommodate the interests of those below them in the social pecking order. For example, trade and financial liberalisation policies have permitted many companies to shift production, and even some services, offshore to capitalise on lower labour costs, weakening unions’ bargaining power considerably. Many lower paid workers have been pushed into insecure, low-paid jobs with poor conditions, a transformation justified by political and economic elites as contributing to greater economic ‘efficiency’ and labour market ‘flexibility’. Owners thus pocket a greater share of the economic pie, while workers’ incomes often stagnate or even decline in real terms, causing wealth inequality to rise steeply...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology

Poetry I disappoint myself each day that I remember my work password I take it that seriously that I base my key on the National Institute of Standards and...