A Common Garment
$14.95In A Common Garment, Anita Patel reminds us that nothing is ordinary. These intensely sensuous poems are rich in flavour, scent, colour, and the sound and feel of languages that inhabit the body and shape our unique selves.
Listen, bitch
$19.95Poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance are back with another excursion into the linguistic and visual pleasures of found text, a joint practice which brought us 2017’s Members Only. With this book, Listen, bitch, they turn their attention to misogynist language, working with a corpus of several decades’ worth of statements by powerful Australian public figures (and other blokes with big platforms). By listening very closely to the snarlings of what Kate Manne calls the law enforcement branch of the patriarchy, these poems attempt to map the lines women are still not supposed to cross in contemporary Australia, and to document the consequences suffered when they do. The results are sometimes harrowing, sometimes ridiculous, and always thought-provoking.
Summer Haiku
$14.95These haiku were written over three summers, camping on our piece of land near Waihi in Aotearoa New Zealand, and, for contrast, one winter sojourn there in our newly-built gypsy wagon. The land is bordered by the Mataura stream—which means ‘red face’. We call the place ‘Land of the shining stream’ or ‘River’s edge’. The eels are named Brad and Angelina. One day, we’ll build a house there. In the meantime, we’re developing the land along permaculture principles, and noting moments both practical and transcendant.
A Coat of Ashes
$19.95Jackson’s new collection traverses science and spirituality, philosophy and matter. Drawing from physics, systems theory, Daoism and more, it contemplates profound questions about our place within a world of being. With deft silences and fine observations, these poems explore both modern and ancient paths to knowledge, seeking to ‘fully apprehend nature, including our fellow beings, and foster a reverent respect for it’.
Canberra Light
$14.95In this, his fifth full-sized collection, Paul Cliff evokes the city of Canberra and surrounding region, where he has lived for the past 20 years. The poems work via characteristically wideranging moods and voice registers, from lyrical and elegiac to narrative and comic. They also deploy a variety of forms, from sonnets and odes to fables and epigrams, underlain by seductive rhythms and arresting metaphor. The capital’s festivals, institutions and monuments, everyday street life, suburbs, and lakescape are investigated, while the more distant terrains of Weereewa (Lake George), Namadgi, the Monaro, the Snowy Mountains, and the South Coast of New South Wales are also evoked in engaging and often striking terms.
Giant Steps: Fifty poets reflect on the Apollo 11 moon landing and beyond
$19.95On 21 July, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on the moon, uttering those famous words: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 poets from around the world were asked to reflect upon the achievement of Apollo 11 and our constantly evolving notions of ‘space’.
Wardrobe of Selves
$14.95Wardrobe of Selves, Peter Bakowski’s seventh full-length poetry collection, pays homage to: the acrostic poem, aphorisms, blues and roots music, the cities of Berlin, Melbourne and Paris, espionage, film noir, haiku, humour, modern history, pacifism, painting, photography portraiture, proverbs, quotations, the sonnet, surrealism and travel.
Palace of Memory: An elegy
$14.95This new prose poetry sequence from Paul Hetherington explores the power of memory and the hauntings of childhood. It takes the reader on a sensuous and richly imagistic journey into expansive ideas of self and identity. It probes and questions the nature of recollection, and how the role of the father and mother may be understood, drawing on a number of existing literary works to create elaborately poetic and deeply satisfying verbal textures.
Acting like a girl
$14.95WINNER OF THE ACT WRITER’S CENTRE WRITING AND PUBLISHING AWARD 2020
Sandra Renew’s new poems interrogate the choices made in living and performing gender, sexuality and desire—of struggling to be queer in an Australia of Holden utes and rotting mangoes, XXXX stubbies and Bundy rum, boudoir drawers and country roads, toad princes and wanting to be Wesley Hall. It is a book of not wanting to conform, charting the myriad pressures society places on conformity as a mode of survival. It is a brave, and sometimes funny book, filled with wry and deeply felt images and observations
The Six Senses
$19.95The six senses have rarely been invoked in such sustained and evocative poetical terms. Whether one wants to understand touch, taste, smell, hearing, intuition or sight, this volume provides myriad avenues enabling a rich appreciation of sensory experience.
Encounters 1: Pierre Bourdieu in conversation with Michael Grenfell
$12.95The French social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is known for the richness and sophistication of his extensive writings.
In these selected dialogues, under taken with Michael Grenfell in the 1980s and 1990s, he is in a conversational mood. Here, he reflects on both his life and the formation and significance of his key concepts and perspectives.
Strange Creatures
$14.95The poems in Alyson Miller’s debut collection are an exploration of the taboo and violence of human nature. From sexuality to the threatening and deadly, these prose poems off new perspectives on the unspeakable, shadowy places of human experience.
Breathing in Stormy Seasons
$14.95These prose poems – I would like to call them ‘moments of poetry – recall journeys and intimacies, spaces of habitation, daily practices of denial, rescue affection or assertation. They reflect on negotiations between body and mind that can so fiercely mark the experience of womanhood, striving to capture the intermittent intensity of this ‘boundless resistance’ through the impact of summer and winter storms.
Sing to Me
$9.95O’ muses excuse
this non-descript call IWonder who
among you apt who
interested
Sing to Me is a collection of poems prompted by classical Greek narratives in such sources as Homer, Hesiod and Ovid. Around Grecian orchards … in Trojan battlefields … washed up with Aphrodite … paeans reveal indictments and human concerns surface.