My new poetry collection, Stellar Atmospheres is out in March by Cordite Books. You can buy a copy in the link or in all wonderful bookstores.

Dr Andrea Rassell writes:

The poems in Sometimes’s collection deftly transcend both spatial scales and time scales. From one line to another we careen across the universe. We fast-forward from the first picosecond of stuff forming in the universe to a Christmas card, millennia later. Her depiction of time and dynamism is visceral – things froth and whizz and quiver in a temporospatial-grammatical practice. We become aware of the minutiae of a life, and of a language, against both vast and infinitesimal phenomena in the universe.

Read all her words here.

Alicia Sometimes has been published many times in publications such as The Age, Best Australian Poems, Best Australian Science Writing, Westerly, Southerly, Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, Going Down Swinging, Hecate, Science Write Now, Moving Galleries Project, Motherlode, Adventures in Pop Culture, Rabbit, Four W, Heat, New Matilda, Griffith Review, SBS Cornerfold, Big Bridge, Verandah, Consilience, Aniko Press and many more.

She has performed at many venues and festivals around the world including Melbourne Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, Sydney Writers Festival, World Science Festival Brisbane, Festival Voix d'Ameriques, Auckland Readers and Writers Festival, Ubud Writers Festival, The Next Wave Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Tasmanian Poetry Festival, The National Young Writers Festival, ANZ Literature Festival (UK), Bloomsbury Festival (UK), Quantum Words Festival (Sydney and Perth) and more.

Alicia has won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, Four W Booranga short story and poetry prize, the Matthew Rocca Poetry Prize (twice), My Brother Jack Poetry Award, Essence of St Kilda Prize and many poetry slams. She has been shortlisted for many prizes—in 2020 she was highly commended for The Charroux Poetry Prize 2020 and the Heroines Writing Prize 2020.

Alicia was co-editor of the literary magazine Going Down Swinging for seven years. She has also guest edited Cordite and Etchings.

Alicia has judged the VPLA Poetry Award (three times), local section for the Greater Dandenong Short Story Award, Young Gourmet Youth Poetry Awards, Glen Eira Eastend Booksellers' Award, Australian Poetry Slam and many others.

In this Cordite essay, Alicia talks about some of the history of Melbourne and poetry.

This is a video when Alicia was just beginning in 1993. Alongside Nat Bates at The Lounge, Melbourne. Kerry Negara did this story for SBS Nomad.

MORE POEMS:

We Are One Long Conversation

(poem from Elemental, previously published in print by Southerly)

We are one long conversation.

We are the future and we are the past. The comma and the apostrophe floating in every library of dimension.

We sit on nothing more than a tender filament: a dish on a lilo on a wave. We are semaphores in the meandering grace of the universe calling to each other across the churning expanse. Unbounded. Sucklings in the growling nests of space. We are fervid elaborations of our best selves. Scatterlings. We exist as music, each note sliding into one another, an exalted purr of song: rising/ falling/ collapsing/ not-collapsing.

We break up. What if then you shatter into scrappy embers? What if I become a lullaby sung to young children, as stars pick up guitars and play in chorus with a D diminished seventh? What if we fold space and go back to the very moment we parted, our lips still bereft of any epitaph? We were once full of swing, luminescent constructs launching ourselves into the unknown. What if we took that walk by the river? What if we weren't heady quasars devouring all other matter? What if I wore red socks, what if you ate paella and I knew the theme to your secrets? One different neutrino and it all could be erased.

We are the slits of laser light splashed on a horizontal screen. Both wave and particle. We progress further. We sense dichotomies around us intuitively as if it was as simple as sleep. Weightless. Easy. We stamp ourselves in the air like God inside thunder. We just didn't know that we are the string. We scan, curvatures of memory, flitting about, always two places at once. We are in the cellar as much as we are in the loft. We are all centaurs, made of the eloquent slapdash of stars.

We wake to every shave of space-time. Monumental extensions. We float on within the nexus of this universe. It splits when action or no action is taken. We are an oscillating lattice of hope. Entangled decisions rippling. The past is a tsunami of probability. We curate opportunity.

We split. You are there. I am here. We combine. Our futures break into endless retorts and digressions. We are mariners. In one universe I am not born and in another I prowl the stars for meaning. In one universe this room is buttermilk, in another, one of you is missing. In one universe, gravity is so strong, faces stretch out across the week, slumping out of exhaustion. In this universe nothing can hold us back. In one universe you hold the violin, in this, the viola d'amore. Barely noticeable but somewhere an Eltham Copper lands uneasy on a mantle.

We are the tree: because of you your daughter exists and it was the result of one moment, hanging out in the wind as normal as sound. Obvious, but not tattooed onto time for certain.

We are the endless slices of bread, one sliver of universe, placed next to another next to another, next to another. Cylindrical, sheets of space, intersecting membranes. Bubbles of universes pressed against each other as if one lover caressing the back of another’s shirt. So far away never risking themselves to say anything. One universe is made up of the giddy stuff of electrons but no protons. The next, all lightning and perspiring angst. Another, the calm note of atoms, but no air.

Infinite. Possibilities that rehearse and rehearse. One life smashed up against the alternative. Absorbing. The vibrations of string, resonating and pluck. You are the cello kissing the Sun. You chisel your way into being, carving out your life's curriculum. We are curled up points in every dimension or sometimes, nowhere at all. Holograms at our own birthday.

If we take the simple equation that we are all relative and non-relative. If we are both the clavichord and the bass. If we sit down at the beginning. If we just meet at the ends. If we hold on long enough to form a loop. If we are both alive and dead but neither. If the moon closes its eyes do we still exist?

We meet on a Saturday, we hold hands near the lake. We talk orthology. We take a moment to let everything in. Every sub-atomic particle pulses. We laugh with the flush of newness. We unravel into each other. We make up the distance of quarks by reaching in for the concept of closer. We arm-wrestle doubt with pleasure. We continue along the continuum. We accept our duality. We know we are humbled by this trek. And in this universe, we don't break up.

We are one long conversation.

Kilonova

Published in Best Australian Science Writing 2018 and Graviton

We are detectives
We eavesdrop

Billions of years ago
two neutron stars

circle each other
desperate and breathless

finishing their last
pressing conversation

Remnants of once intense lives
cascade into a final spiral
until they embrace

smashing platinum
and gold into existence

a violent coalescence
outshining at least 100 billion suns

their collided mass
propagating gravitational waves
across the fabric of space
at light speed

gamma rays detected
only a moment after

We were watching
We were listening

We saw them encompass
each other completely

with their final words
rippling right through us

City Lights 1952, Charles Blackman

Published in Meanjin

‘And in a golden glass I see the dream-wished day appear—and wait.’
Joy Hester

These city lights illuminating
every brushstroke between us.

How fierce, the brash of black.
So perfect, the relief of bay blue.

You, standing either side of yourself.
The day closing into an essay.

Before me, a striped amphitheatre.
Canvas with a built-in mirror.

Streaks of old Victoria Bridge, a camel
on the skyline. Two circles, up front
hingeless, imposing and direct.

Stop signs to the end of the world.