Publication Date: 01 August 2025
RRP: $29.99
ISBN: 9781923192485
Format: Paperback
Size: 153mm x 234mm
Pages: 192
Category: Coming Soon, Verge

Verge 2025

Blue

Edited by Jonathan Ricketson, Cassie Kropp, Shalom Grace Verghese and Yong Li

This item will be released August 1, 2025

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 pieces that span 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 the electric charge of blue.


Jonathan Ricketson

Jonathan Ricketson is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University. His fiction and nonfiction writing has been published in Meanjin and Australian Book Review. He is the 2025 ABR Rising Star.

Read More

Cassie Kropp

Cassie Kropp (they/she) is studying a Master of Research in Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. Their plays have been performed in the Anywhere Theatre Festival in Brisbane but now they focus more on academic writing.

Read More

Shalom Grace Verghese

Shalom Grace Verghese is a scholar in children’s and young-adult literary studies. She recently submitted her PhD thesis, ‘Desiring Monstrous Heroes in YA Supernatural Romances’, for examination at Monash University. Her research intersects with queer feminist theory, masculinity studies,...

Read More

Yong Li

Yong Li holds a bachelor’s degree and a PhD from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. She is a lecturer in the School of Marxism at Shanghai Maritime University and a visiting scholar in Chinese Studies at Monash University. Her...

Read More