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The Writing Mind: Creative Writing Responses to Images of the Living Brain

$39.95

The Writing Mind: Creative Writing Responses to Images of the Living Brain includes 60 creatively enhanced, colour images of the living brain. Each image is followed by two short-form creative writing responses: prose and poetry written as ekphrastic ‘replies’ to the images. This book was conceived through a partnership between the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing in Australasia, and the Science Art Network (ScAN), affiliated with the neuroimaging department at Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia.
The broader context for the partnership is a Creative Writing | Neuroimaging Research Study currently being undertaken at Swinburne University’s neuroimaging facility. The study investigates the activity in participants’ brains while undertaking a creative writing workshop. While The Writing Mind focuses on creative rather than traditional research outputs, it nevertheless reflects the shared commitment of AAWP and ScAN—an abiding fidelity to transdisciplinary, open and collaborative research practices. AAWP and ScAN share an interest in the intersections between diverse disciplines—arts/science and arts/health—while considering the ways we can work together for the future for our fields and for a better world.

Tide of Tides by Paolo Totaro

Tide of Tides

$29.95

“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

What-we-carry_

What We Carry: Poetry on childbearing

$29.95

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

What it Feels Like by Brendan Ryan

What It Feels Like

$26.95

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.

Slippage by Angela Gardner

Slippage

$24.95

ByAngela Gardner

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?

9781764106894-Perfect

Hybrid Heaven & other(ed) poems

$24.95

ByAndrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss

Hybrid Heaven & Other(ed) Poems is a bold, genre-defying collection that maps the textures of diasporic identity across continents, cultures, and histories. Moving between Canberra, Leighton Buzzard, Accra, Kingston, and beyond, Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss stitches together fragments of memory, music, migration, and myth into a vivid poetic tapestry.
From batik to Doc Martens, from ska, hip hop and punk to Walcott, Gilroy and Brathwaite, these poems remix the past and present into a living, breathing archive. Languages collide, geographies blur, and identities are worn, reworn and remade, sometimes in tension, always in motion.
At once personal and planetary, Hybrid Heaven explores what it means to belong across multiple worlds: to be stitched from routes as much as roots, to navigate histories of displacement and survival, and to transform fracture into form.
This is poetry as tailoring, as excavation, as sound system, where every line carries the rhythm of a life lived between, beyond, and through.

Nespola by Anders Villani

Nespola

$24.95

ByAnders Villani

Arresting in scope and nuance, Anders Villani’s third collection voices the tension between answering a demand for care and the inner stories that question our capacity to give and receive it. Crises in two relationships—siblings; intimate partners—become more than calls for the embodied love that care requires, and is. They become tests of humanness, in ways the book’s studies of childhood and adolescence contextualise.

Employing the supple formal control, narrative propulsion, braiding of myth and memory and dream, and the rigorous, compassionate self-inquiry that charged his first two collections, Villani gestures—in moments of access; in lapses and ejections; in almost impalpable feeling; in presence—towards a core behind core beliefs. A poetic space, where the loquat—nespola—fruits.

‘Using seemingly everyday materials and sensations, Nespola hums with its lucid, uncanny tableaux of ambiguous intimacy. These audacious, haunting narratives and lyrics, peppered with ecstatic punctures and folds, know what our bodies bury and hold. They ask, “how much of myself, to save / myself, can I destroy?”. Anders Villani is a wayfinding alchemist.’
Andy Jackson

Thistle by Kate Maxwell

Thistle

$24.95

Life doesn’t always bloom the way you expect. Sometimes it prickles.

Thistle is a raw, searching collection that traces the arc from childhood wonder to middle-age reckoning — and everything bruising in between. These poems look back without flinching, finding beauty in imperfection and meaning in the mess.

Spanning stories and snapshots of growing up, growing wary, and growing weary, it also paints a changing country and consciousness where early wonder, and aspirations are increasingly floodlit by the glare of global decay. These poems capture the pain and beauty of holding on, preserving, or naming love. Sometimes tender and lyrical, many poems are brushed with a generous splash of scepticism and humour. Yet, beneath the cynicism, these poems still strive to believe, in the necessity of resilience.

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I Lost Someone Then Found Them in My Body

$24.95

ByHeather Taylor-Johnson

For someone living with chronic illness, every minute the body is in a state of biological transitioning. Add in the constant shifting of menopausal hormones and we’ve got something really complex – and amazing. Varied in style but tight on voice and succinctly thematic, the poems in Heather Taylor-Johnson’s seventh collection concern themselves with the astonishing and regular connection between the body and its surroundings – the social, political, cultural and environmental. The poems unsettle and hope, they reach and cling, and the outcome is a book as playful as it is full of weight.

Sky Writing by Adrian Caesar

Sky Writing

$24.95

ByAdrian Caesar

with Artworks by Kat Rae

In the voices of a brother and sister, the poems in Sky Writing tell of a tragic love story from different perspectives. The life of an RAF pilot, friend to the brother, lover to the sister, comes to a premature end in a flying accident. The poems explore the collision of romantic love with the doomed romance of military service and provide an elegiac refrain for both.

Kat Rae’s artistic response to the poems expands and enhances their significance, providing a vivid and thought-provoking complementary visual experience.

Taken together, the poems and images create an alternative memorial to more traditional modes of remembrance.

Gert by Jacqui Malins

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.

ACE IV

ACE IV: Arresting Contemporary stories by Emerging Writers

$24.95

Emerging authors from vast geographical regions examine the conundrum and contradiction of human experience through carefully crafted detail. The brevity of short-form writing makes it an apt vessel for capturing the haunting incompleteness of human experience. Through flash and traditional length short stories—fiction and life writing, as well as hybrid forms of storytelling—there is a compelling ebb and tow of ideas, as focalised through highly idiosyncratic voices. The authors work deftly, paying due homage to the crucial relationship between the focalising voice and sharply rendered detail—cultivating narrative features with intuitive hands and minds, fashioning abstracted realities that linger beyond the final lines of the text.

Book of Birds

The Book of Birds

$24.95

edited by Penelope Layland and Lesley Lebkowicz
with artwork by Fenja T. Ringl

The poems collected in The Book of Birds—the work of a wide range of contemporary Australian poets—do more than describe. They invoke the many meanings of birds in our lives and imaginations.

ACE 3

ACE III: Arresting Contemporary stories by Emerging Writers

$24.95

The contributions to ACE III are diverse in form and theme. As a composite picture the collection represents an expansive vision for short-form writing. We include work by authors from diverse cultural and geographical locations, including – Australia: Gadigal Country, Dharawal Country, Wodi Wodi Country, Wurundjeri land, Naarm, Jinibara Country, Whadjuk Country, Turrbal & Yuggera land, Ngunnawal Country, as well as Dallas (USA), Mexico City, Greece, Norway, Tbilisi: Georgia, NYC, Chennai: India, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia.

The authors examine the conundrum and contradiction of human experience through carefully crafted detail. The brevity of short-form writing makes it an apt vessel for capturing the haunting incompleteness of human experience. Through flash and traditional length short stories, creative nonfiction, memoir, and hybrid forms, there is a compelling ebb and tow of ideas, as focalised through highly idiosyncratic registers. The authors cultivate narrative detail with intuitive hands and minds, fashioning abstracted realities that linger well beyond the final lines of the text. The contributions leave the reader reeling, asking how it is possible that story-work can enter our affect cycle as if it were lived experience.

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Borderless: A transnational anthology of feminist poetry

$24.95

Borderless presents a collection of brand new, specially commissioned poems from a wide range of contemporary poets refl ecting on feminism in its broadest sense. While it builds on the work of previous anthologies, in this one the voices of First Nations, refugee and migrant poets are a deliberate focus. These poems plunge the reader deep into the experience of life in the world, at this moment, in a woman’s body, and explore multitudinous versions of what that can mean.

Edited by Saba Vasefi, Melinda Smith and Yvette Holt

Not Very Quiet

Not Very Quiet: The anthology

$24.95

ByMoya Pacey, Sandra Renew

Over the last five years, from the #Me Too Movement to same-sex marriage, from devastating bush fires to the global pandemic, the online poetry journal Not Very Quiet has dedicated itself to publishing women’s voices from across the globe. Not Very Quiet: The anthology selects poetry that has given voice to the social conscience of the community, constructions of lesbian and queer, the challenges posed to the social construction of gender, as well as the complexities and possibilities of the human condition.

Edited by Moya Pacey & Sandra Renew

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