Published in Overland Issue 226 Autumn 2017 · Uncategorized Equal first place: MANY GIRLS WHITE LINEN Alison Whittaker no mist no mystery no hanging rock only many girls white linen men with guns and harsher things white women amongst gums white linen starch’er things later plaques will mark this war nails peeling back floor scrubbing back blak chores white luxe hangnails hanging more than nails while no palm glowing paler later plaques will mark this sick linen’s rotten cotton genes later plaques will track the try to bleed lineage dry its banks now flood a new ancestor, Ordeal, plaits this our blood if evil is banal how more boring is suffering evil two bloodlines from it how more raw rousing horrifying is the plaque that marks something else rolling on from this place a roll of white linen dropped on slight incline amongst gums collecting grit where blak girls hang nails hang out picking them hangnails Read the rest of Overland 226 If you enjoyed this prizewinning poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Alison Whittaker Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi multitasker from the floodplains of Gunnedah in NSW. Between 2017–2018, she was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Law School. Both her debut poetry collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire, and her recent collection, Blakwork, were published by Magabala Books. More by Alison Whittaker › 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 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.
