Crossing Bloodlines

The poems in this collection trace the overlapping cycles of the human journey from birth to death across the space/time habitat we measure in footfalls and poetic metre. Travelled in the company of family and community, our journeys enact the species’ heritage and legacy of kinship and violence – two sides of the same struggle towards a longed-for intimacy that might negate the spatial, temporal and psychological divide between the other and the self. Through commingling languages and intertwining elocutions, this issue explores the distances and intimacies between a varied set of human journeys by poets writing in Indonesia and Australia. As these two countries are so close on maps – but oftentimes, sadly, only on our maps – these poems invite the re-arrangement of our conceptual geographies.