Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 · Main Posts / Writing Your Sea Stuart Cooke You’d say this grass is a slab of light green sea and the myriad white flowers scattered through it the tips of waves whipped up by the wind, or it might have snowed with these flowers, most of which have now melted on a warm, grassy bed. These are your modes, in which varieties are crystallised into drops of perception. My poems begin as surrealist mess, you say, which my conscious mind refines into sense. It’s your world talk. We are specks of pollen floating; your poems trace the outline of two at the moment of their collision (and their gentle parting is the closing of the poem’s mouth). You weave webs of wispy glass, thin fingers of light set against backdrops of heavier material clusters: what we all see but never speak. This poem, then, is a return to the sight of the already spoken. Stuart Cooke Stuart Cooke’s latest chapbook, Departure into Cloud, was published by Vagabond Press in 2013. His full-length collection is Edge Music (IP, 2011). He is a lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University on the Gold Coast. More by Stuart Cooke Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 23 February 202324 February 2023 · Writing From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author Rob Horning Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.