2025 Editions Archives - RECENT WORK PRESS

This is What it Feels Like

$19.95

A woman recedes in her kitchen when her adult adopted son shows up on the street. A daughter furtively watches as her mother finds bliss. Memories assemble, then unravel. Women love and are loved, are betrayed and betray, choose to stay, sometimes riddled with indecision, and leave—wondering if they should cut the ivy before they go.

The fox traces a spectral presence—vanishing, returning, delivering messages, wreaking carnage, inspiring love and heralding transformation. Recurring images converge and diverge, disappear and re-emerge in slant.

This is What it Feels Like is a collection of interweaving stories by five diverse voices, exploring identity in all its multiplicity. Together, these individual stories speak to our innate interdependence as humans.

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Peckinpah Suite

$19.95

ByPaul Munden

Paul Munden checks into the suite of rooms in the Murray Hotel, Livingston, Montana, once occupied by Sam Peckinpah, legendary director of The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and other notorious classics. For the poet, it is an act of homage and immersion, not without risk. Addressing Peckinpah directly, he reflects on the films – and the turmoil of their making – in poems both personal and finely attuned to Peckinpah’s own experience.

At the heart of the book is a vision of Peckinpah’s long-cherished but never realised project: Castaway. This more extensive piece bears witness to the director caught up in his own nightmarish script, a dark journey of self-discovery, shadowed by the poet. The overall Suite is a highly informed and structured work that wrestles with the nature of an uncompromising talent, revered yet often misunderstood.

‘I read Paul Munden’s Peckinpah Suite and was so moved by his sublime accomplishments that I immediately reread it. Peckinpah Suite immediately became one of my favorite works of poetry. Munden’s deep research into the life and works of Sam Peckinpah is mightily impressive.’
W.K. Stratton ,author of the award-winning bestseller The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film

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Tide of Tides

$29.95

ByPaolo Totaro

“Paolo Totaro’s Collected Poems were published in 2012. Taken together, the Collected Poems constituted the work of more than sixty years, spanning the period from 1950 to 2011—‘all my adult life,’ as Totaro wrote in his foreword. Except that there was, and there is, more life to come, and with it a startling concentration of poems. In the thirteen years since his Collected Poems, Totaro has written as much poetry as he did in the sixty preceding years. This new book collates that remarkable yield.

In so doing, this book belies the preoccupation of many of the poems with infirmity and impermanence. For every presentiment of mortality or every shift of feeling towards resignation, there is a counterpoise, perhaps an observation or intuition or aphorism, or simply an expression of mood, which refreshes the poet’s sensitivity to a vital spark. For all the eclecticism of this volume—Totaro’s wit, the breadth of his intellectual interests and the variety of his expressive modes are undiminished—its chief motive is an insistence on life for life’s sake.”

From the Introduction by Theodore Ell

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Grief: Five sequences

$19.95

ByCassandra Atherton, Jen Webb, Oz Hardwick, Paul Hetherington, Paul Munden

In this volume of prose poetry, five poets approach grief in different ways; the emotion sometimes recognisable, sometimes disguised. Their works grieve for those who are gone while they traverse the idea of the abiding presence of loss. If a melancholy sense of absence is occasionally registered in these poems, there is humour too. And, more generally, there are many salutary expressions of grief-inflected yet powerfully present feelings of love and desire.

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Gert

$24.95

ByJacqui Malins

It is 1924, near Queenstown on the west coast of Tasmania. A boy holds a double-barrelled gun with a bright-eyed black cockatoo perched on the barrel. A young woman with short curly hair stands beside him in the button grass, a dead black cockatoo dangling from each hand.

When artist and poet Jacqui Malins saw this arresting image in a photograph, she was captivated by the woman’s face and intrigued by the scene. What is this place? Who is this woman, and what is she doing?

GERT is a non-fiction narrative collection of poetry and images. It tells two inseparable life stories: one of a place, and the other of a woman who lived there.

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Fruits of Exile

$19.95

ByMaggie Shapley

Maggie Shapley’s new collection Fruits of Exile explores the theme of exile through a fictional book group brought together to discuss the works of Australian poets Gwen Harwood and Margaret Scott–‘literary exiles’ in the male-dominated spaces of Australian poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Through this lens, Shapley weaves a poignant tapestry of women’s lives shaped by migration, memory, and resilience. Through the voices of seven women in a Canberra book club, these poems trace journeys of emigration, marriage, motherhood, and self-discovery. Each poem is a window into moments of loss, longing, and quiet triumph—whether in the ache of distance, the rituals of domesticity, or the search for belonging. With lyrical clarity and deep empathy, Shapley’s collection invites readers to reflect on what it means to leave, to stay, and to find home in unexpected places.

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What It Feels Like

$26.95

ByBrendan Ryan

What if Feels Like brings together poems published over the past twenty-five years from Brendan Ryan’s seven poetry collections, as well as introducing thirty new poems. Ryan’s poetry has long been recognised for its varied use of poetic forms, the laconic musicality of its language, its incisive clarity and direct address to a reader. Rural life, in particular dairy farming, has never been written about with such a critical and memorable style. Over the course of seven poetry collections, Ryan has critiqued and celebrated his connections to his family farm, the back roads and small towns of the Western District, cows, and underpinning such examinations are a series of new poems honouring his late father. This is a poetry of empathy and longing, elegies and portraits written with a gentle irony. What it Feels Like is an essential contribution to ‘the tradition of hard pastoral’ in contemporary Australian poetry.

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The Naming of Clouds

$19.95

ByRoss Donlon

Temporal, spiritual, elemental: this book is Blakean. It reads like Ross Donlon’s combination of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems create a ‘path made by words’ sometimes spoken in the voice of a child, sometimes the voice of a man, that attempt to come to terms with life’s voyage over the surface tension of water, that separates today from yesterday and the living from the dead. Written in ghazal form, the poems have a totemic beat as Donlon moves from the ‘Hollywood idyll’ of his parents’ fibro honeymoon to the adult aftermath. At one point, Donlon foreshadows the stellar ‘Twilight’ with a telling quote from St Augustine: ‘The dead are invisible, not absent’. The elemental imagery resonates throughout the collection, especially in the concluding poems ‘Water’ and ‘My Ship’ where Donlon equates life’s voyage to the ‘catches & rolls’ of the ocean, to the ‘moon’s skin’ and confesses, ‘I swim each morning in a reservoir, a place where something is kept in store. / That something being kept is its soul—and mine’.

Deeply felt and deeply moving.
Joel Deane

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Jack Mundey in Red Square

$19.95

ByJames Lucas

‘Tea and cake with a Trade Unionist is strange….
… He’s the good sense, the tact not to say ‘scab labour.’
He’s arrangements to savour. This cup without sugar.’

James Lucas’ second collection suggests that the incongruous may be our best avenue to insight. These meticulously crafted poems reveal again and again that neither our pasts nor our present are as we’ve been told: that our past, as Faulkner noted, isn’t even past. In these poems tradition and the canon resonate in unexpected ways with contemporary life, so that we understand a sunflower more exactly with the help of Da Vinci and the Rolling Stones, and Kenneth Slessor offers us a window on Matthew Flinders and Aukus subs. In a volume of enormous thematic scope and formal range, Lucas finds for each idea the shape of best fit, be it sonnet, verse essay, or bento box.

Shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection 2026

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Wita Witalana (look out over)

$19.95

ByPaul Collis

Winner of the ACT Literary Award for Poetry 2026

Wita Witalana (look out over), Paul Collis’ second collection of poetry, deliberately inhabits space where history is written on the person. But it is a history deeper than, and in contest with, any idea of ‘Australia’. Collis asks us not only to see the effects of colonialism on a people, but to experience those effects as someone thrown into its brutal shadows. It mourns old ways of being, the loss of connection with country, and the loss of family and friends while offering a powerful meditation on the complexities of Indigenous life in contemporary Australia. These poems resonate with a deep sense of longing, memory, and the enduring strength of connection to land and culture. They are a powerful call to listen to messages carried through the trees, and a reminder of the stories etched within the Australian soil.

‘The searing ‘Barkindji’ voice reminds us that so much remains unreconciled in the depravity of colonialism-crimson brush strokes on tarnished Dreaming.’
Samuel Wagan Watson

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The Kool-Aid Dispenser

$19.95

ByDavid Musgrave

The kool-aid of The Kool-Aid Dispenser stands for any number of things: grief, enduring institutionalized foolery, either the nonsense of handed-down beliefs, or their denial. And, backwards, it is about the power of language to discover and surprise us. The Kool-Aid Dispenser contains poems of loss, balanced by many poems that celebrate renewal and hope. The elegies which make up the first section move from the personal to the universal, concluding with a touching tribute to Musgrave’s friend, the late poet Jordie Albiston. The book’s last section, ‘Koels to Newcastle’, deals with the local and the domestic, yet as with the whole of the book, these are always placed squarely in relation to larger contexts through tensile and energetic lines which impel language towards being alive to the world.

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The Unknown, Great

$19.95

ByAnna Forsyth

‘Like you,
I have been through many skins, a cicada
sings and I understand
what it is to be like the onion
but I only cry when you do.’

The Unknown, Great is the new collection of poetry from Anna Forsyth. Set between Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia, these are poems that chart the intersections between the resonances of relationships, the complications of love, and the vibrations of place. With precise, evocative imagery, The Unknown, Great offers us glimpses of the world refracted through the lens of Forsyth’s keenly observed poems and subtle, often moving reflections on the self.

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