Jen Crawford is one of the poets featured in Te Purere/The Exodus: The Anthology of Expatriate New Zealand Poets, edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas, Cold Hub Press, 2025, which will have it’s Sydney launch on Saturday, 6 Dec from 3pm – 5pm at the Stanley Street Gallery, 1/52-54 Stanley St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010. This is a Poetry Sydney event. Tickets are $15 and are available from   https://events.humanitix. com/sydney-launch-te-purere-the-exodus

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A flitch of bacon

How can I love when the one who sits behind me folding plastic bags for three-
quarters of an hour is the librarian herself? Yet others continue to study. Four
thousand flitches lie flat, cold fat stripped from the bone. Love has nothing to
do with it, she says of her forty-six years of ballet lessons. I pay my fees. I feel
the pinch, and so I go. A stalactite, the hanging flitch, white as fat, stone.

**

Sunday derives
IM GMC

I go back in dreams along Sunday drives to see you again, back through weird bends for the excellent corbels and fretwork, for the plummeting ravines, car-case conversions, the guy on the road in the puddle of blood, and beyond to the bonfire, jazz club, pool tables high on the hill. Jimmy the Fish holds a lighter to his young man’s hair and the silver-cape island’s laid out below. You sang our way round it, endless comedy of turns – Mary had a baby, yes lord, Mary had many, Mary had the feel of a mouse in her trousers, Mary had the look of a dog tucked in. We go picnic at Sugar Loaf, sandblast at Medlands and in dreams as awake it takes years to run back over the dunes, galeforce wind flaying wet legs: that’s us learning triumph from you.

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Jen Crawford is a Professor of Creative Writing within the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. She has previously lived and taught in Aotearoa/New Zealand and in Singapore. Her work focuses on the poetics of place, ecological imagination and on cross-cultural engagements in various literary contexts. Her poetry collections include Bad Appendix (Titus Books), Koel (Cordite Books) and A General Image of the Whole Countryside Recovering from the Effects of Winter (forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann). She co-edited Story Ground: The Anthology with Paul Collis (Recent Work Press) and Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan with Rina Kikuchi (Recent Work Press).