edited by Penelope Layland and Lesley Lebkowicz
with artwork by Fenja T. Ringl
The poems collected in The Book of Birds—the work of a wide range of contemporary Australian poets—do more than describe. They invoke the many meanings of birds in our lives and imaginations.
The Gospel of Unmade Creation, the debut collection by Thabani Tshuma, is about reshaping. It is an examination of the ways we are taken apart and put back together and what exists in that space before ‘rebuilding’ or ‘recovery’. This book is a truth, in the way truth can be both something made and something that already exists. It is an origin story told in non-linear vignettes. Part-testament, part-tome, part exercise in reflection, the poems in The Gospel of Unmade Creation traverse scene, theme, space, and time in search of a sense of ‘self’.
You lead me through strange geographies.
You say, up here the tide
cannot drown our sandwiches.
Es Foong’s debut collection explores the strange geographies of belonging: to family, gender, culture and oneself. It ponders boundaries; the predicament of needing to assert them even as they cause pain and separation. It explores influences on identity and the fault-lines of trauma, how these are woven into our bodies. It sees the power and the possibility of the pause – as breath, silence, a poem’s whitespace – and as an alternative way of being, survival and love.
Feldspar, the new collection of poetry from Brendan Ryan, is unflinching in its focus on rural landscapes, the treatment of farm animals and the humble lives of people often missing from poetry. There are odes to invigilators, truck drivers, a family member who took to walking, laments for dogs and the hardened realities of country living. A sense of longing for and loss from the country is a sub-text for poems that reveal how place is never only a geographical location, but more of a state of mind to be revisited again and again and where belonging can also be found in music, driving or looking at the country you inevitably return to.
For over a decade, international poets Alvin Pang (Singapore) and George Szirtes (UK) have met time and again—as friends and fellow wordsmiths on page and stage—until the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Confined to different sides of the globe, they began to write poems back and forth in response to one another. Reflecting on the circumstances in which we find ourselves living, the two poets dance in language through questions of life and time, with the world teetering from Covid through Black Lives Matters and Brexit to the Ukraine conflict.
The dictionary defines consumption as both the ‘use of a resource’ and ‘a wasting disease’. This collection explores the different acts of self consumption a person can go through—sacrifice and selfishness, defeat and hubris. It’s an unpacking of guilt for making the wrong choices; for contradictory compulsions; for complicity.
Utilising comprehensive research undertaken at the National Records of Scotland, On the Record takes as its starting point the death certificates of a number of Martin Dolan’s direct ancestors. Each poem imagines itself into the thoughts of its subject/speaker, developing a mosaic that gives a small sight of Scottish social history, primarily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In this second collection from award-winning poet, K A Nelson, extends the themes in her 2018 debut collection, to write as desert flâneur or reminisce as the moon. In her concerns about the natural world she speaks directly to a kookaburra and pays homage to the riparian zone. In writing of loss, love and its antithesis, she employs wry humour or a sometimes-brutal response to aspects of contemporary Australian society that may startle readers or pose a question: how can we be better?
Beginning with a childhood in and around depressed Cornish mining, Pancakes for Neptune is a detonation of neoliberal waste. Bullock understands that conservatism – whether in public or private realms – is, by definition, a protection racket. However, this collection is not an angry one. It sparkles with a rich lyrical and imagist vein, stirring us to dwell on this earth in relationship with others, with respect, rapture and exuberant interest. Owen Bullock’s latest collection showcases his restless experimentalism as well as his sly, generous and quirky sense of fun.
Erin Shiel’s debut collection brings together insightful vignettes about the arc of maturity to womanhood, exploring kindness, grief and the neglected beauty of everyday life. The collection slips through multiple identities, interleaving ekphrasis with lyric and nature poems. The effect is a dynamic tension between fiction and truth, invention and autobiography. Many of the poems, imbued with nostalgia, reclaim the liminality of girlhood, as an opportunity to form identity. A ghost girl character appears guiding the reader through the sections of the collection, with poems related in turn to the themes of girlhood, identity, finding mettle and contemplating nature. With whimsy and playfulness, emotional insight and nuance, Girl on a Corrugated Roof uses empathy and the natural environment to draw art out of the gallery and into our everyday lives.
It’s the 1970s and 1980s, and Sandra Renew, a young lesbian activist in Far North Queensland, is involved in some of the most politically charged moments in Australian history. From Pine Gap to civil rights marches in Queensland to the first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and beyond, Apostles of Anarchy juxtaposes newspaper headlines and archival material with the personal experience of these struggles. It asks what it is to fight for the acceptance of difference in a discourse of prejudice and hostility.
Nathan Shepherdson’s new collection, parallel equators is a book in five sections, under the five vowels, and through the five apparatus of one hand. It attempts to return its messages to a sender (or senders) locked somewhere in a haze of accidental truths. Words travel at irregular pace on a walking tour through a dissociative alphabet of concepts and images. Fingernails, silence, glass, leaves, eyelids, absence, lungs, and full stops all become entangled as ‘body types’ in this idiosyncratic language. Patterns repeat the self. Transcriptions of conversations between elegy and memory possess a natural cadence that counts out the oxygen molecules in life’s strange abacus.
Shepherdson’s poems are snap-fingered mosaics, dry ingredients holding their breath, so as not to sink, as they unexpectedly set on wet paper surfaces. Is Shepherdson a well-grounded, metaphoric-driven pragmatist, or a quiet, well-meaning fantasist, who wanders off each day, towel in hand, to meet Heraclitus for an afternoon swim?
Get all fifteen of our new poetry collections released as they are released 2023
Featuring new work by:
April
Nathan Shepherson, Sandra Renew
May
Ally Chua, Alvin Pang & George Szirtes
June
Erin Shiel, Owen Bullock
July
K A Nelson, Martin Dolan
September
Es Foong, Brendan Ryan, Thabani Tshuma
October
Jennifer Allen, Brent Cantwell
November
Jen Webb, Kerry Greer
Warm yourself this winter with 4 new titles from Recent Work Press:
June
Erin Shiel Girl on a Corrugated Roof
Owen Bullock Pancakes for Neptune
July
KA Nelson Meaty Bones
Martin Dolan Untitled
Our year kicks off with 4 new titles from Recent Work Press:
April
Nathan Shepherdson parallel equators
Sandra Renew Apostles of Anarch
May
Ally Chua Acts of Self Consumption
Alvin Pang and George Szirtes Diaphonous
In these prose poem sequences, five different tastes are explored, not only with reference to food and drink,but also through their metaphorical use. There are innumerable ways of ‘tasting’ and apprehending theworld, and these poems canvass a wide range of them while also encouraging readers to consider their own diverse tastes, preferences and experiences.
In Bed with Animals is a personal poetic exploration of the horror and banality in one woman’s lived experience of gender discrimination. It examines the contemporary world through an ecofeminist lens and considers the way that women, the environment, and animals suffer exploitation. This incendiary debut collection unsettles with its heartfelt ferocity.
In 1778, Dorothy Wordsworth’s mother died, and the six-year-old Dorothy was sent to live with extended family. She never returned to the family home, and it was not until adolescence that Dorothy became reacquainted with her brother William. The two formed an intense and passionate emotional bond. By 1794 they were living together from that time would rarely be physically separated for more than a few weeks at a time, for the rest of their lives.
Written in the voice of Dorothy, Beloved traces the progression of their relationship, from the ecstatic infatuation of youth onwards, drawing upon Dorothy’s diaries and letters as well as the recollections of friends and family members and literary and biographical scholarship.
In his first full-length poetry collection, Natural Philosophies, Michael J. Leach grasps for truth and solace by embracing interdisciplinary perspectives and alternative meanings. The poems in this collection address the archaic term ‘natural philosophy’—the philosophical study of nature and the universe—in past, present, and future contexts through the lenses of various natural science disciplines, including botany, zoology, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. Michael explores a range of urgent personal and public issues, from climate change, extinction, and post-truth logic to assisted dying, natural death, and COVID-19, all the while pinpointing much-needed beauty across physical, emotional, and spiritual domains of existence.
Like much else that finds its way onto the internet, the poetry in ‘I saw the best memes of my generation’ is fleeting, reactionary and selective with its facts—only ever tangentially concerned with the ‘real’ world. Somehow this book skewers SS utes, flower arrangement, the antiquated forms of Italian Opera, the emerging politics of the climate crisis and the misogynist underbelly of rock and roll with one flukey shot of an arrow. This much anticipated debut collection pins Symes’ viral poems down like delicate butterflies for the pleasure of your eighteenth century drawing room.
The contributions to ACE III are diverse in form and theme. As a composite picture the collection represents an expansive vision for short-form writing. We include work by authors from diverse cultural and geographical locations, including – Australia: Gadigal Country, Dharawal Country, Wodi Wodi Country, Wurundjeri land, Naarm, Jinibara Country, Whadjuk Country, Turrbal & Yuggera land, Ngunnawal Country, as well as Dallas (USA), Mexico City, Greece, Norway, Tbilisi: Georgia, NYC, Chennai: India, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia.
The authors examine the conundrum and contradiction of human experience through carefully crafted detail. The brevity of short-form writing makes it an apt vessel for capturing the haunting incompleteness of human experience. Through flash and traditional length short stories, creative nonfiction, memoir, and hybrid forms, there is a compelling ebb and tow of ideas, as focalised through highly idiosyncratic registers. The authors cultivate narrative detail with intuitive hands and minds, fashioning abstracted realities that linger well beyond the final lines of the text. The contributions leave the reader reeling, asking how it is possible that story-work can enter our affect cycle as if it were lived experience.
True to its title, the poems in O’Hagan’s second poetry collection, Anamnesis, allude to a world hovering at the edges of our minds, one that can be sensed and yet lies, teasingly, just beyond conscious reach. The arc of poems through time and distance represents a summoning up of, and immersion in, small moments which reveal themselves to be quietly momentous; a distillation of personal experience from which we feel there is something to be collectively gleaned. The recovery of memory in its various facets is explored, and the poetry that emerges is both poignant and lyrical.
Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award (US) (Poetry Category), 2023.
Shortlisted in the Rubery Book Award (UK) (Poetry Category), 2023’
Via numerous portrait poems of real and fictitious people revealed in Our Ways On Earth Peter Bakowski returns our attention to the individual. Via clear, non-judgemental portraiture Our Ways On Earth saves, for our consideration, individuals who might otherwise be buried, lost to us, under a slag heap of statistics, demographics and generalisation.
Whether in the Venetian footsteps of Vivaldi, at the birth of the Owen and Sassoon violins or the score of a Sam Peckinpah film, these poems present a wealth of musical scenarios, all interconnected in their themes, tonality and form. Their reverberations reach across time and space, from England and Italy to the Australian outback, with the visual arts also in the mix. And yet the core of this book is deeply personal, the poet present as a ten-year-old boy, lover, grandfather – or anachronistic witness – at the various trials of life through which creativity and even humour somehow flourishes.
Ragged Disclosures is a prose poetry collection that investigates liminality, intersubjectivity and the prose poetic sequence. These sequences combine to create a complex and distributed depiction of an intimate relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic in this era of climate change and political instability. As the volume considers the protagonists’ diverse experiences, it explores the development of connected poetic tropes while highlighting tensions between prose poetry’s compression and the countervailing tendency for sequential works to present an unfolding narrative arc. The inherent raggedness of the narrative gestures, combined with prose poetry’s condensed and suggestive boxes, is playful, contemporary and quintessentially poetic.
With stunning formal range and architectural design, Anders Villani’s second collection explores how violence engenders selfhood by calling it into radical question. What does it mean to suffer in a body that also symbolises power? How can poetry, alert to the ‘blur’ and the ‘panorama’, trace this moral dissonance at its subtlest and most intimate? How do notions of illness and recovery, victim and perpetrator, rest on fraught archetypes, and what alternate understandings emerge when these foundations waver? Villani roves between myth, confession, narrative, and dream to address such questions—not abstractly, but through the experiences of a subject whose capacity to love and be loved is at stake.
Novelistic in arc and scope, lyrically sensuous and searching, Totality invites readers on a journey of self-inquiry that dredges new channels in the contemporary poetics of trauma. As secrets reveal and conceal themselves, through the crucible of hypermasculinity, and with unstinting compassion, Villani’s poems venture an expansive and timely music.
