2021 Editions Archives - Page 2 of 2

What We Carry: Poetry on childbearing

$24.95

What We Carry brings together the voices of more than 60 contemporary Australian poets to provide accounts of childbearing that are both lyrical and embodied. Featuring diverse voices and perspectives on experiences of infertility, conception, termination, loss, pregnancy, birth and the early postpartum period, this collection illuminates the endlessly different ways the potential to carry life is experienced. The poems invite you to share incredibly personal stories – some humourous, some sincere, some full of elation and love, others frustration or despair. They provide powerful insights into the potential for childbearing experiences to shape us, change the trajectories of our lives, and teach us about what it means to be human. For after all, all of us were carried, at the beginning.

Edited by Ella Kurz, Simone King and Claire Delahunty

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the moment, taken

$19.95

ByJennifer Compton

the moment, taken is Jennifer Compton’s eleventh book of poetry. At this late stage she has yielded to the absolute lure of eidectic memory. That is – ‘relating to or denoting images having unusual vividness and detail as if actually visible.’ And there is the pleasure in poetry for her. The damage, the drama, the tableau, the tall tale and true. It must be knocked out of true. There are rules.

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Obligations of Voice

$19.95

ByAnne Elvey

If we are to speak, what is it we must speak? If we are allowed to speak, what is it we must say? Who constitutes the ‘we’ that speaks? Anne Elvey’s new collection frames such questions against the contemporary world and its multiple challenges. These poems in turn explore environmental encounters, subtle and overt expressions of the political, the elisions of history, the embodiment of the world and the nature of grace, through poetry sharply attuned to its subject matter. For Elvey, poetry has an obligation not only to chart intimate moments, but also to draw those moments towards the numinous matter of our Earthy habitats.

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F-Words

$19.95

ByJacqui Malins

‘F-words’ is less expletive, more reconnaissance flight. In this five-year exploratory survey of territory that might include poetry, Malins forays into fables, fauna and flora, family, feminism, faraway and further. Whether in factual, fictive, fabulist or forensic form, Malins is squinting through life’s surface reflections and writing what she glimpses underneath.

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I am the Glass

$19.95

ByPenny Drysdale

I am the glass

with all this inside

my transparent walls

the sun

the moon

the bubbles

all this intoxication

Penny Drysdale invites readers into her home and her transience as her relationship begins to end. It is never easy to get on with your life. I am the glass is window into these tender invisible journeys.

‘A piercing portrait of the many ways we rebuild after loss. I am the glass is the bark stripped away.’
Johanna Bell

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Our Tongues are Songs

$19.95

ByRico Craig

In Our Tongues Are Songs, Rico Craig pursues the intimate, the voices people use as they speak to their private fears. Craig brings his unique ear for lyricism, his eye for human need, to bear on the promises people make to themselves as they attempt to find solace, companionship and meaning. His haunting use of image fills the day-to-day world with the uncanny — bats are comforted by children, old women weep tattoos, the earth burns, television stars comfort teenagers as they struggle with anorexia, encroaching sands spill the dead into an unnamed city. This book spans voices, generations and countries; it sides with the young and old as they try to carve their humanity from the swirls of despair.

‘These poems of bone, sky, night and earth pulse with danger and exaltation. Selves spectral, imagined and embodied dissolve the solitary ‘I’ to imagine flocks of selves, dancing with knives in their hands, standing on rooftops, never forgetting what it is to be at our wildest. They overflow with loosened energy, yet their crafting is meticulous, brilliant and exact.’
Felicity Plunkett

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Errant Night

$19.95

ByJerzy Beaumont

What would you do if you looked up and saw that the night sky was darker than usual? That the stars had disappeared, and nobody was doing anything about it?

What do you do when a loved one tells you that their world is darker than usual? That they see no light, and don’t know what to do about it?

Errant Night is an exploration of resilience executed imperfectly. In this sequence of prose poems, Beaumont draws upon the sci-fi wonders of interstellar travel and spaceship mechanics to throw comparative light upon the realities of living with the burden of loss.

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Rare Bird

$19.95

ByJames Lucas

Intellectually ambitious and culturally engaged, these poems speak of Sartre, Zola and Jackson Pollock, of Western Australia’s firewatch trees and Dubbo’s gibbons, of the poet-batsman Stevie Smith, of youth and age. Ranging in form, James Lucas’s poems ask to be reread rather than assented to, and are written in the belief that poetry is both solvent and fresh lick of paint.

‘James Lucas’s poems explode with brilliance, warmth and music’— Stuart Barnes

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Nightmares Run Like Mercury

$19.95

ByPaul Collis

From the author of the David Unaipon award winning novel Dancing Home.

Paul Collis’ first collection of poetry is a book of difficult truths and profound connections. It charts a life lived on the streets, on country, in the deep time of tradition, of relationships to land and family. This book mourns those who have passed, and the current state of places and people held close in the heart and in the kinds of knowledge inseparable from self that might be called ‘being’, but is always much more than that. It is also a poetry of hope in the hopeless, of beauty in small moments, and the overwhelming ‘now’ that is memory.

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For the Record

$19.95

ByRoss Donlon

In his teens, Ross Donlon had poems published in The Bulletin, Australia’s iconic journal, and in 1965, the literary editor predicted ‘an exciting future’ for the young poet. Donlon’s next poem was published thirty-three years later. In a ‘second budding’ he has had many poems published across Australia and overseas and read at festivals both at home and in Europe. For the Record charts his journey as a poet over five decades, including the Bulletin poems, and the later dark and comic poems for which he has become well-known.

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It’s the Sugar, Sugar

$19.95

BySandra Renew

WINNER ACT Notable Book Awards for Poetry 2021

These poems move freely in time from the 1950s to the present day, from the contemporary to memoir, from gender politics to bushfires and floods. They show you jeeps, trucks, girlfriends and cane-cutters, widgies, Singer sewing machines, tattoos and rats and class grudges.
Sandra Renew uses a range of traditional poetry forms to lay bare some of the gaping fault-lines of gender relations especially as they are experienced by LGBTIQ communities.

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