Verge 2025

Blue

Cassie Kropp, Jonathan Ricketson, Li Yong, Adara Rose Luis

• Publisher: Monash University Publishing
• eBook ISBN:
  9781923192508
• Year: 2026

New Australian writing from emerging and established writers The blue geometries of the seats of a departing train. Lightning striking twice out of the blue. The rhythm of faint blues. Blue is the most mysterious and evocative of colours. It can signify the beginning of love and the end of life. It can evoke tranquillity or tension. For Ted Hughes, blue is a 'kindly spirit', an 'electrified', 'thoughtful . guardian'; for Joni Mitchell, it is a sigh-filled song, a 'foggy lullaby'. For Henry David Thoreau, the 'blue ground' is the source of 'new truth'. And Goethe writes: 'We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances us, but because it draws us after it.' In the nineteenth edition of this creative anthology, writers from Monash University and beyond share fiction, nonfiction, poetry and experimental forms. They explore shades of blue that ravish the senses, narratives saturated in melancholic hues, and poetry that hums with an electric charge of blue.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Introduction
• 1 Full-Time at the Poetry Factory
• 2 Blue History
• 3 Blue and Yellow Friendship
• 4 Montmartre Mirror
• 5 New Year’s Day, Auckland, 1969
• 6 Kαημός (Kaimós)
• 7 In the Vicinity of a Love Poem
• 8 Blue Geometries
• 9 Blue
• 10 Infinity Dancing
• 11 Permission to Disappear
• 12 True Blue
• 13 Thirteen Uses for the Ties in Parliament House
• 14 A Brief Flirtation with You Blue
• 15 Shades of Hostility
• 16 Bruised
• 17 Quick Exit
• 18 Vessel
• 19 Rayleigh Scattering
• 20 Blues for John
• 21 Wetland Walk
• 22 Cicada Music
• 23 Pearl Fishers
• 24 Tipping Points
• 25 Blue Whale Watching
• 26 Data Points Blue: Great Barrier Reef (Suite 2024)
• 27 On Consumption
• 28 Drone Anger
• 29 She Knew the Agents Were Dabbling with AI
• 30 On Learning that My Artwork Is Being Used to Train AI
• 31 Prompt
• 32 Baby
• 33 Gravidity
• 34 Milk Teeth
• 35 Graveyard
• 36 Blue Dot
• 37 The Spirit of Blue
• 38 Bluesanelle for a Jazz Musician Who Died by Suicide
• 39 Ghazal of the Blues
• 40 Blush of Cornflower
• 41 Trying a New Angle in Geometry
• 42 Blue Heaven
• 43 The Carnegie Swim Centre Is Now Closed
• 44 Bluebottle Words in an Ocean of Memory: Remembering that Day Back in 2003
• 45 The Kingfisher
• 46 Max Beckmann
• 47 The Blue Alice
• 48 Prayer Bones
• 49 Der Blaue Berg
• 50 Building, Antenna, Span & Earth
• 51 The Blue Man
• 52 Driving Discomfort
• 53 Bluejohn
• 54 Treatise on the Cyanometer
• Coda: The Sound Blue Makes
• About the Contributors