Overland literary journal

I’ve always had the aching feeling that—as a text to be shared among friends and maybe eventually ‘enemies’—the soul-body dialogue poem is a way of arguing towards spiritual certainty in the face of earthly corruption and doubt.

The Voice referendum is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the younger demographic to shape the future of the nation. Future generations of younger Australians will have to live with the outcome of October 14 for quite some time. If the referendum is defeated, it mean a nation was given the opportunity to recognise its First People and refused it.

The sporadic attempts by chefs and food writers making the case for offal are unconvincing, as what these advocates don’t appreciate is the answer probably lies in taking a more intercultural approach, drawing direct inspiration from other food cultures. It’s wasted effort to create hip new ways of making offal delicious, given there are already so many ways of preparing it that continue to work well.

The elevator doors opened like the top being peeled away on a can of sardines, and at least half a dozen squirming pink bodies blinked out at us, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the absurdly small elevator. They shuffled their feet and pretended not to see me, not to see my wheelchair or the flight of stairs visible through the glass walls. No one got out, but the doors remained open, ignorantly optimistic. After a few awkward seconds, a hand darted out from somewhere in the middle of the group and jabbed the Close button.

Supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, and named after the late Neilma Gantner, this prize seeks excellent short fiction of up to 3000 words themed around the notion of ‘travel’; imaginative, creative and literary interpretations are strongly encouraged. This competition is open to all writers, nationally and internationally, at any stage of their writing career.

Established in 2007 and supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets seeks poetry by writers who have published no more than one collection of poems under their own name (that is writers who’ve had zero collections published, or one solo collection published). It remains one of the richest prizes for emerging poets, and is open to poets anywhere in the world. In 2023, the major prize is $6000, with a second prize of $2000 and a third prize of $1000. All three winners will be published in Overland.

Days pinch and lately I’ve noticed every time I look in the mirror I’m squinting—maybe it’s a grimace. Without trying I’ve mastered the façade of a Besser block threatened by a mallet, by which I mean maybe the world won’t kill me but it’ll definitely hurt and I’ve got to be ready.

Characterising videos of trans people telling the story of their transness and the gender-affirming care they received as indoctrination and coercion is a lethal claim. The goal of this tactic is to limit information transfer and knowledge-sharing on gender-affirming care, as well as to suffocate the stories of trans joy that follow.

The art of bookkeeping is the privileged art form of the university. It seems to get more layered and complex, year-on-year. 'How can the artist’s time be quantified? How can art be captured as output and those outputs sorted into data sets and returned as value?' These are just some of the bizarre questions I think the university is fixated on. The question I am fixated on is what words poets can give to the transformation of creativity into productivity?

It seems lesbian identity has become something of a cause célèbre for the global right, providing pseudo-progressive cover to anti-trans hate. Lesbians, the logic runs, are women who are exclusively sexually attracted to other women, and therefore uniquely clear-sighted about what the most important and defining part of any woman is: the pussy.

She slammed the bedroom door shut, turning us both into silhouettes against the fading light filtering through the large open window. Barely in the room, she collapsed on the bed in front of me, said, “Smartphones are what cigarettes were for the great masses of people once addicted.” Reaching across her bed, she dipped her hand into the bottom drawer of her bedside cabinet and pulled out a single cigarette.

‘This again?’ and ‘why now? Why not years ago?’ are the two questions raised in each new translation of a non-English piece of Western Canon. There’s an understanding—of course a poetic cycle like the Duino Elegies is incomplete in English, there are endless new readings—and a simultaneous sense of wounded pride/suspicion: what was missing the last time around? What were you concealing from me? What are you concealing now?

On the tail of a series of sublime and haunting Australia Crime pictures to release in the post-pandemic era, Limbo joins a canon of thoughtful, skilfully made films that present a harrowing subtext about Australian society, and the inherent violence that permeates it, focusing on the Indigenous Australian struggle for the excavation of an ongoing history of oppression by the hands of White Australia.