Published in Overland Issue 206 Autumn 2012 · Uncategorized Breathless Jessica L Wilkinson after Judith Crispin’s Self-Diptych There are bees at her mouth and birds at her eye – flying. The dust, so scattered as froth on a wave, passing. Her pores open to the breath’s quotation: address the horizon; look to the moon. Her mind, open. Jessica L Wilkinson Jessica L Wilkinson’s latest book of poetry is Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (Vagabond Press, 2019). She is the managing editor of Rabbit and an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at RMIT University. More by Jessica L Wilkinson › 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 17 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.
