Angela Gardner

"What does it take to hold the sky in place?"

Angela Gardner is a Welsh Australian writer and visual artist with eight published poetry books including Parts of Speech, UQP, 2007 Winner of Thomas Shapcott Prize and The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette, Shearsman, shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, 2022. Her most recent collections are The Closed Spaces, Shearsman Books UK, 2026 and Slippage, Recent Work Press, 2026 which was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2023.

Author's books

Slippage

$24.95

For an immigrant, the relationship with a new country develops over time. In poems that investigate place, belonging, dislocation, fear, and catastrophe, Slippage charts Angela Gardner’s complex relationship with Australia taking us through wonder and joy, to guilt, misunderstanding, and distance. Slippage takes the reader onto the unstable ground of a history constantly selected and refined to edit out uncomfortable truths from the narrative of nationhood. With the fluid nature of memory and the threat of climate breakdown how can we understand and care for this beautiful but conflicted place we call home?

 

Some Sketchy Notes on Matter

$19.95

‘Some Sketchy Notes on Matter came together slowly around preoccupations of safety and shelter at an individual, societal and global level. I also wanted to look at the tensions between digital and analogue reality, between the city and a natural world that exists without us, strange, compelling and precarious. At its worst these tensions become an imbalance, a violence, threatening not only the individual body but the entire planet.’

the future, un-imagine

$14.95

 In 2015 poet Angela Gardner was invited to the print studio of artist Caren Florance to set some blocks of ‘random’ text using metal letter­press type. As a separate creative work, ‘The Future, Un-imagine’ was taking form in Gardner’s mind; there was also ambient sound in the studio, a radio playing and wide-ranging conversation taking place between the two as Gardner set the type. Her seven ‘key’ textblocks were then print-performed by Florance for over a year to produce multiple readings and visual patterns, reflecting the structured chaos that Gardner uses in her writing practice. The artist book that emerged, Working Papers, is impossible to reproduce ‘accurately’ without losing many of its material properties; this chapbook is an opportunity to remix some of its pages to form new arrangements around Gardner’s resolved poem. The result is an augmented presentation of the poem and a companion to the limited edition artist book.