In Dublin Wandering, Nathanael O’Reilly rearranges, remixes and recombines words and phrases from James Joyce’s Ulysses into eighteen poems, each named for the corresponding episodes in Joyce’s novel. Dublin Wandering is a surrealist work inspired by modernist techniques and philosophies, created as a homage to Joyce’s masterpiece and Dublin.
‘Lucy Alexander’s Equations of Breath is a questing volume of poetry and prose poetry that frequently tantalises the ineffable. It probes the intimate connections between people, and human relationships to the more-than-human world. At its core is a series of moving poems illustrating memory’s connection to identity and perception. Equations of Breath also deals poignantly with the experience of dementia and the complex relationships between parents and children. This book is imagistic and linguistically playful, powerfully foregrounding the importance of the imagination.’
Paul Hetherington
‘Lucy Alexander’s fourth collection conjures landscapes where the line between internal and external worlds blurs. What strikes in these intimate poems is breath. Here it is tight. There it is released with relief, longing or grief. Here the ‘blue and yellow of time’ bleed into each other along phylogenetic lines. There ‘is no time in the present’ and ‘love is a measure of distance.’ Vulnerable and defying Equations of Breath beckons for its craft and care.’
Dominique Hecq
Shortlisted for the ACT Literary Awards 2025
I missed it, the entire history of our blue world.
How many heads rolled? Did they go defiantly?
I will sacrifice myself by becoming an automaton.
It is all too much! The past and future have coalesced into a spherical twister of succulents, stardust, money boxes and chatbots. You keep it together with outstretched arms, a child of this earth wielding a hurricane. All that is you whirling about in the mix: erotic books and bull ants, blackbirds and stoic philosophers. The whole world caught in a balancing act of blue whales and human brains, super computers and microplastics. As a matter of survival, you start bringing it together, moulding it firmly into the density of a dark star. A volatile idea pushed heavily inward, until it takes shape in your clamped hands. When you take a look, there is an ancient fruit – an apricot, with a modest blush. It is exquisite! But if you plant it, what will grow? If you eat it, what will you become?
‘This debut volume by Asha is crammed with rich and richly surprising poems, all of them characterised by sharp-edged observation, vivid images, and many a quirky turn of phrase. These poems take all that is familiar about lyric poetry, and lift it to a new plane of operation, in voice and presence, shifts of tone, close critique, and unexpected twists of humour. And whether the poems are about overwatering plants, anticipating another war, or sex parties held by cockroaches, they are infused with ethical sensibility, and always generous encounters with the perplexing things that come at one in everyday life.’
Jen Webb
The poems in this collection were written over the past few years in various locations: riverbanks; hospital corridors; writers retreats; oceans; in the leaf litter photographing fungi; by the fire with my two dogs; hotel rooms on business trips. I am inspired by all the poets that have walked beside me and have written words to fuel the fires for positive change and peace. Yellow Tailed Black cockatoos have just flown over and, as always, I run to catch a glimpse. My dogs have learnt their cry and join me on the back deck. These birds often arrive marking key episodes in my life, including this last piece of writing for this collection. Makarra is reflected in my poems, rain nourishes my words, water cleanses my thoughts and refreshes the path of the life journey ahead of me.
Winner ACT Literary Awards 2025
Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2025
Shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award 2025
Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award 2025
Highly Commended in the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Andrew’s sixth poetry collection, Outside of Here. Outsider Hear!, is mined from rich lived experience in Ghana, Japan, Europe and Australia, Moss draws upon his positionality as an Anglo-Akan-Australian member of the African Diaspora. This collection is refreshingly diverse in its multiple viewpoints and planetary humanism, meditating on the dichotomous condition of alienation, belonging and the many experiences in between. Outside of Here. Outsider Hear! unlocks experiences of the dislocation of migration and home as an imagined and remembered place.
In this, his sixth full-sized collection, published exactly 30 years after his first collection, The Wolf Problem in Australia back in 1994, Paul Cliff explores the themes of Faith, Grace, Hope, Devotion—Fragility, Responsibility—Privilege, Relegation, Betrayal & Loss—in multifarious aspects across an array of personal and historical situations. Subjects range from the title poem’s prayer-flags flying in the family back garden, to the respectful approach to playing piano, considerations of the plight of zoo animals during the Battle for Berlin, the demise of an old Pilot Station; the latter-day disinterring of bodies from the Franklin Expedition, and the musings of a seventeenth-century Inquisitor investigating ‘possessed’ nunneries. There are wry and/or beautiful takes on crocodiles, blue tongue lizards, the thylacine, quolls and whippets, along with an array of sonnets, and two ironic bucolics contemplating degradation of the Darling River and fancifully reconstructing Burke & Wills.
Largely set between a main road and a watercourse in a residential-industrial suburb in Melbourne’s west, Taking Apart the Bird Trap is altogether haunting, unsettling and transcendent. Set in motion by the sudden loss of a father, Anastasi provides us a glimpse into the first and second generation migrant experience, the restlessness of domestic dysfunction, the transformative power of grief, and the defiance of love.
This collection traces the period from 2019, and the catastrophe fires in Australia, through the COVID years and beyond, feeling its way into how we live in the world, and how we might reflect on the value of listening to the many voices that make up our everyday experience. Written primarily in prose poetry, it attempts to expand the capacity of the sentence, rather than the line, to gesture toward what is rarely said (or cannot be said), and to offer fragments of stories about finding a home in the world as it is, and as we are.
Shortlisted for the ACT Literary Awards 2025
In the face of fire, flood and plague, environmental catastrophe and political chaos, the challenge is that poetry, in Auden’s words, ‘show an affirming flame’.
The poems in The Dancing Man are an attempt to move from grief and loss towards consolations, however limited these might be. Intimations of connection and inter-dependence between all living things is the fragile basis for a first step towards spiritual re-orientation and an art of hope.
Weathered explores the era in which we find ourselves – the Anthropocene – and how we are transforming the world on a cataclysmic scale. The climate emergency is altering our weather, landscapes and our connections to place. Covid-19 has upended our social systems and sense of security. Circling the intimate connections between place, memory and identity, these poems trace the psychological fallout of anthropogenic change to our ecologies and climactic patterns. Weathered weaves together the physical, emotional, and social landscapes transfigured by the Anthropocene and Covid-19 into a poetic history of memory and transformation.
