Verge 2025

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.