THE LATEST
Rabbit
MUTINY
‘A journal for nonfiction poetry could be considered its own kind of sustained mutiny, as a space and mode through which to refuse to obey the orders and conventions of genre, to reject the navigational tools that separate books into neat categories on bookstore shelves, to dwell in a less ‘comfortable’ literary space to see what might emerge.’
The poem rebels against the known, the fixed, the rule. In times like these, a poem can give shape—mutable, flexible shape—to our rebellion against certain authorities, to the changes that we seek, to the hope that keeps us going.
NEW FROM THE RABBIT POETS SERIES
In the Printed Version of Heaven
SHOLTO BUCK
Full of cheek and wit, Sholto Buck’s debut collection presents us with a kaleidoscopic view of (sub)urban feeling, being and relating.
Vehicular Man
MITCHELL WELCH
Mitchell Welch’s debut collection is an inventive tour de force that sets forth, in the words of Dominique Hecq, ‘a poetic universe full of provocation, seeings-into and ludic energy.’
NOW FREELY AVAILABLE IN DIGITAL FORMAT
XIII Poems
JORDIE ALBISTON
A wish
Inside is an astonishing thing when let out. Perhaps not
All of the above applies.
Inside is an astonishing thing when let out.What goodbyes?
All of the above applies.
One manages to contain the odd caterwaul. What goodbyes?—
There is, there is an idea of the kind, after all.—’KINDNESS’, JORDIE ALBISTON
News
‘We say ‘when this is all over’ as a way of fantasising about certain things: touching people, wandering the streets, lying in the sun. But we know that there’s nothing to return to, that is, there is only something different ahead, something yet to be realised, something to hope for and build towards.’
‘It’s true that I find the horizon and the construction of vanishing-point perspective really interesting—almost a language, trying to get at a tension between inwardness and the world as it is.’
‘Borders have very little to do with physical boundaries and far more to do with ideational ones. For me, the practice of political thought is very much about understanding ideological coding, about learning how we are constructed as subjects.’
‘A lot of my poems end up being driven by a feeling, the desire to communicate something abstract in a concrete, resonant way—I look toward how language can do that, rather than structure. And I think that’s because I love the language of lyric poetry.’
‘As I’ve aged, I have developed a fairly relaxed attitude to writing poetry—it’s a form of play involving a mix of words, ideas, images, sounds, textures, shapes and rhythms—a pleasure that nothing else provides. The poem generates from nowhere, everywhere, or anywhere.’
‘In its attention to language, poetry tests the limits of what can be said. In this respect, it seems to approach those emotions or experiences that seem unrepresentable or that would render us inarticulate. In terms of structures of power, poetry is a vehicle of replication but also possible difference in its capacity to ‘tell it slant’, as Emily Dickinson put it. That is, it can enact thinking against foundation.’
‘Grappling with the parallax, / I slammed the brakes and tipped.’
‘but what’s the difference // between diving and bound-to-happen falling? / These curved lines—they must / describe passage underneath.’
‘denuded pastures knocked up with alien seed / forced into furrows with too much water, the thirstiest of crops / invasive, intensive, insistent impositions’
‘imagine a barb-wired mist. imagine / memory’s leash. your breath a steady war.’
‘it’s good to be walking / past a new tree, even / if it’s just that / i collect / myself’
‘but somebody tipped the bins / somebody wrote no in the sky’
‘A slice of pizza, is a sector; start at / the North and turn thru the required angle’
‘The bold aggrieved & cowardly respondent— / men who burst their imperfect gold box.’
‘how it sits round in my jaw / fills my mouth, boxy and serious’
Rabbit is currently accepting submissions for Issue 40: the EXTINCTION Issue, to be guest co-edited by Elena Gomez and AJ Carruthers.
The sixth mass extinction bears the marks of centuries of capitalist accumulation. While the science of climate catastrophe is well documented and broadly accepted, ways of preventing extinction are far from settled. Poetry has engaged with the destructive nature of capitalism and imperial expansion since early English industrialisation, and contemporary poetry confronts these questions with aesthetic curiosity and force. If it feels impossible to imagine a future, poetry offers itself as a site to do just that.
Rabbit is currently accepting poetry submissions for Issue 39: the MUTINY Issue, to be guest co-edited by Jennifer Compton and Joan Fleming.
When you don’t trust the captains, it’s time to take back the ship. For Rabbit: MUTINY, we seek rogue poems that resist the usual rules of resistance. We’re after nonfiction poems, in all aesthetic registers, that scorn the tyranny of planned obsolescence, false idolatry, rabid anthropocentrism, bad governance, and the logic of the market above all else. Send us your long-sighted, large-hearted, reverent/irreverent calls to arms.
Rabbit is currently accepting poetry submissions for Issue 38: the ARCHIVE Issue, to be guest co-edited by Anne Casey and Jason Wee. How can we, as poets, return to the archive and reanimate voices and lives silenced through time and the resolve of official record-makers? How else might we think of, approach and (re)imagine archives, as cosmologies, as expansive structures for comprehending larger, wider dimensions, like the past, time, universes? For this issue, we are interested in poems that explore, engage with, test and challenge 'the archive' as place, space, repository and/or concept.