Magdalena Ball

My piece “Earth Scars” was a finalist in the 2019 NWF/joanne burns Microlit Awards! The piece will be published, along with the two winners, KA Rees for her piece, ‘No White M&Ms’ and Hunter category winner Shaynah Andrews for ‘The Ocean Has Made Promises’, and many other wonderful pieces by fellow finalists and commissioned authors, in the anthology Scars, The anthology will be launched and winners presented with prizes at the award ceremony and panel event at Newcastle Writers Festival on Saturday 4th April, 2020, 3.00pm-4.00pm , Wheeler Place Marquee.

A new poem of mine, “Borisov” has been published in Cordite 95: Earth edited by Maria Takolander. This is such a wonderful, very relevant issue (although Cordite is always wonderful to be honest – every issue is beautifully curated).  To quote from Maria Takolander’s editorial: “Why ‘Earth’? Because we are of it, because we are destroying it, because there is nowhere else. Because to think about anything else right now feels like dissociation.”  To go directly to the issue, click here: http://cordite.org.au/content/poetry/earth/.  A link directly to my poem is below.  Note that Borisov was the first observed interstellar comet and the second observed interstellar interloper after Oumuamua.

Borisov

Brianna Bullens has written a terrific review of High Wire Step at the wonderful Plumwood Mountain: “It is a collection full of radical empathy, understanding a shared vulnerability with each other. It claims multispecies alignments with animals—bees, cats, wolves, pigs, chameleons—and with our environments, in the precarious conditions created through the Anthropocene.” Read the full review here: https://plumwoodmountain.com/brianna-bullen-reviews-high-wire-step-by-magdalena-ball/

Beth Spencer’s wonderful review of High Wire Step has been published at Rochford Street Press: “So how might a personal approach to re-imprinting our past apply then to the planetary Anthropocenic grief? This is a question raised for me by this intricate book with its folding and refolding of time and memory and experience and life. How can honouring our past — every bee, plant, microbe — witnessing — affect our future?” To read the full review visit: https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2019/11/29/beyond-the-culturally-scripted-response-beth-spencer-reviews-high-wire-step-by-magdalena-ball/

The wonderful Beth Spencer interviews me about my poetry book High Wire Step for the Climactic Network’s new Artbreaker show.  You can listen or download the show, which includes me reading several of my poems, talking about writing through the Anthropocene, art as activism, and a lot more, here: https://www.climactic.fm/94

My poem “Asterion” has recently been published at the wonderful FemAsia Magazine. FemAsia is a monthly online magazine that focuses on issues and events which impact on girls and women in our contemporary world. This issue is full of new work in the arts, in the news, about food, travel, philanthropy, and taboo topics. FemAsia is here: http://femasiamagazine.com  and you can jump directly to “Asterion” here: http://femasiamagazine.com/asterion/

My poem “Watagan Walk” has been published in Ginninderra’s Press’s latest anthology Mountain Secrets, edited by Joan Fenny.  A version of the poem was also published in my full-length poetry collection Unmaking Atoms.  Mountain Secrets, an anthology of over 150 poems by Ginninderra Press authors, will be launched in the Blue Mountains (NSW) on Saturday 2 November, and can be found in the Ginninderra Press bookstore.

The wonderful Not Very Quiet is a twice yearly online journal for women’s poetry which is beautifully edited/curated by Sandra Renew, Moya Pacey, and a fabulous series of guest editors. Issue 5 was guest edited by Tricia Dearborn with a provocation of ‘Earth Poems’, particularly as embodied by Rachel Carson’s writings and deep love of the natural world. The issue, which is absolutely full of gorgeous writing, and which I’m delighted to have a poem “Rhythmic Oscillations” in, can be found here: https://not-very-quiet.com/issue-5-september-2019/

My poem, “Linguistic Junkyard”, has been published in Australian Poetry Journal 9.1. This rather wonderful issue was guest-edited by John Kinsella, and includes some 100 pages of poetry written around the theme of resistance. The collection includes many poems by First Nations poets from across Australia, along with some nonfiction on the theme. Just looking through the table of contents gives me shivers, as there are so many amazing poets represented and Kinsella’s choices are incredible.  Copies can be obtained here: https://www.australianpoetry.org/australian-poetry-journal/

I’m very pleased to have my poem “Wing Feathers” included in the 2019 Raining Poetry in Adelaide series. In collaboration with the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice (University of Adelaide), the chosen poems are poems are temporarily tagged onto the pavement to be revealed when it rains.  Raining Poetry in Adelaide 2019 launched on the 4th of September 2019.