Crossposted from Jonathan Shaw's blog Me Fail? I Fly!

Jeff Sparrow (editor), Overland 203, Winter 2011

This is another excellent issue of Overland. Rodney Croome puts the current debate over who's allowed to marry whom into an Australian historical context where restriction of marriage rights has been significant for convicts and until shockingly recently for Aboriginal people. Benjamin Law tells how Twitter kept him connected with his home city, Brisbane, when he was in India during the floods. Phillip Deery gives three alarming case histories from the bad old days (we hope) of ASIO. There's a swag of poems, of which the ones that spoke most to me are by Ali Alizadeh (a poem dedicated to the Bard of the Hawkesbury Bob Adamson that begins cheekily, 'Rivers are all the same. Dirty water / if you're lucky, smelly mud and silt / increasingly the case.') and Thomas Denton (an energetic vernacular narrative that shared with Judy Durrant the 2010 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize).

Fiona Wright has an excellent, optimistic piece on the Death and Rebirth of Heat. This is the first in the Meanland series of essays about the changing world of publishing that I've been able to engage with, and anyone who misses Heat as it was ought to read it. The essay took an unexpectedly personal turn for me. After noting the paucity of metropolitan newspaper reviews of Heat and other Giramondo publications, it goes on:

We’ve had much more support from bloggers, many of whom have given the magazine – and the books – consistent coverage and space. They’ve often written about HEAT with a level of thought and understanding that we should have expected, but didn’t. (One blogger in particular has always taken great pains to point out any typos we missed. But you can’t expect in-depth without a few ripples.)

Oh my god, she's talking about me! Though perhaps not, because I didn't so much point out typos as complain bitterly, some would say churlishly, about errors that either confused or, probably more often if I'm honest, amused me: 'gauge' instead of 'gage' really did stop me in my tracks, whereas 'vesper' for 'Vespa' was to smile. It would be nice to think I have been 'instrumental in generating and spreading word of mouth' for Giramondo's publications, as she says bloggers often are, because of course I love their work.

A final word, because now I have a reputation to maintain: Thomas Nelson's poem 'The Pirouette', set in a 'beach joint' in New Zealand, includes the line, 'New Zealanders call this kind of house a Batch'. Well, not really. That's not a typo, it's a spelling mistake. What New Zealanders call that kind of house sounds like 'batch', but it's generally spelled 'bach' (as in bachelor, I think). The mistake in this case may be attributed to the poem's narrator, of course, but this is a piece of New Zealand English, like 'pottle' (what yoghurt comes in) and 'section' (allotment) and 'dairy' (milk bar) that can trip up unwary Australian editors.

Read More: Overland 203