Recent Work Press

True to its title, the poems in O’Hagan’s second poetry collection, Anamnesis, allude to a world hovering at the edges of our minds, one that can be sensed and yet lies, teasingly, just beyond conscious reach. The arc of poems through time and distance represents a summoning up of, and immersion in, small moments which reveal themselves to be quietly momentous; a distillation of personal experience from which we feel there is something to be collectively gleaned. The recovery of memory in its various facets is explored, and the poetry that emerges is both poignant and lyrical.

Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Award (US) (Poetry Category), 2023.

Shortlisted in the Rubery Book Award (UK) (Poetry Category), 2023

Finalist in the Eyelands Book Awards (Greece) (Poetry Category), 2023

In his first full-length poetry collection, Natural Philosophies, Michael J. Leach grasps for truth and solace by embracing interdisciplinary perspectives and alternative meanings. The poems in this collection address the archaic term ‘natural philosophy’—the philosophical study of nature and the universe—in past, present, and future contexts through the lenses of various natural science disciplines, including botany, zoology, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. Michael explores a range of urgent personal and public issues, from climate change, extinction, and post-truth logic to assisted dying, natural death, and COVID-19, all the while pinpointing much-needed beauty across physical, emotional, and spiritual domains of existence.

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.

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

In Animals with Human Voices you will find worms that dream of god, jellyfish weary of immortality, a powerless Superman, some illogical observations on aliens’, a lightning conductor tired of lightning and the truth about Elvis.  In multi award-winning poet Damen O’Brien’s debut collection, his cinematic eye and love of nature deliver poems which are ciphers for the normal concerns of every human: love, life and death and what we leave behind.

These are poems of love and loss, they imagine a world where hawks fly from the arms of lovers and disappear into a dying world, where golden fish rise from rivers and tangle themselves in hair, where molecules and mist carry messages of love through cites. In this collection, beginnings and endings slice across each other, modern and mythic intertwine, the everyday is stirred into a world of metaphor and incantation. Individual poems chime off each other, creating strands of narrative which circle the collection’s central symbol, the nekhau — small fish-shaped amulets crafted by ancient Egyptians and plaited through the hair of loved ones to ward off drowning. In a contemporary and at times imaginary world, the poems become nekhau, articulating the fears and dangers underlying love in order to subdue them. In doing so the poems transform many tropes of love poetry, repositioning them in contexts both everyday and otherworldly. The bodies in these poems fight against the mortality of love, they borrow lore and build new myths as a way to protect love’s fragility. Glistening with musicality and precision, these poems twist and shimmer like fish leaping toward the fears that have shaped them.

‘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

‘As affected by a work as they are by a word, as attentive to the world as they are to the body, as absorbed in other languages as they are in her mother tongue, these poems balance “lull’”and “leap”, “shadow” and “light”, “violence” and compassion. They are serious and witty, controlled and fervent, lyric and experimental. Errances is a smart, unswerving and dazzling collection.’
Stuart Barnes

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.

‘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.

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

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.

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.

‘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

Nathan Shepherdson’s new collection, parallel equators is a book in five sections, under the five vowels, and through the five apparatus of one hand. It attempts to return its messages to a sender (or senders) locked somewhere in a haze of accidental truths. Words travel at irregular pace on a walking tour through a dissociative alphabet of concepts and images. Fingernails, silence, glass, leaves, eyelids, absence, lungs, and full stops all become entangled as ‘body types’ in this idiosyncratic language. Patterns repeat the self. Transcriptions of conversations between elegy and memory possess a natural cadence that counts out the oxygen molecules in life’s strange abacus.

Shepherdson’s poems are snap-fingered mosaics, dry ingredients holding their breath, so as not to sink, as they unexpectedly set on wet paper surfaces. Is Shepherdson a well-grounded, metaphoric-driven pragmatist, or a quiet, well-meaning fantasist, who wanders off each day, towel in hand, to meet Heraclitus for an afternoon swim?

The Gospel of Unmade Creation, the debut collection by Thabani Tshuma, is about reshaping. It is an examination of the ways we are taken apart and put back together and what exists in that space before ‘rebuilding’ or ‘recovery’. This book is a truth, in the way truth can be both something made and something that already exists. It is an origin story told in non-linear vignettes. Part-testament, part-tome, part exercise in reflection, the poems in The Gospel of Unmade Creation traverse scene, theme, space, and time in search of a sense of ‘self’.

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?

You lead me through strange geographies.
You say, up here the tide
cannot drown our sandwiches.

Es Foong’s debut collection explores the strange geographies of belonging: to family, gender, culture and oneself. It ponders boundaries; the predicament of needing to assert them even as they cause pain and separation. It explores influences on identity and the fault-lines of trauma, how these are woven into our bodies. It sees the power and the possibility of the pause – as breath, silence, a poem’s whitespace – and as an alternative way of being, survival and love.

Erin Shiel’s debut collection brings together insightful vignettes about the arc of maturity to womanhood, exploring kindness, grief and the neglected beauty of everyday life. The collection slips through multiple identities, interleaving ekphrasis with lyric and nature poems. The effect is a dynamic tension between fiction and truth, invention and autobiography. Many of the poems, imbued with nostalgia, reclaim the liminality of girlhood, as an opportunity to form identity. A ghost girl character appears guiding the reader through the sections of the collection, with poems related in turn to the themes of girlhood, identity, finding mettle and contemplating nature. With whimsy and playfulness, emotional insight and nuance, Girl on a Corrugated Roof uses empathy and the natural environment to draw art out of the gallery and into our everyday lives.

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.

The dictionary defines consumption as both the ‘use of a resource’ and ‘a wasting disease’. This collection explores the different acts of self consumption a person can go through—sacrifice and selfishness, defeat and hubris. It’s an unpacking of guilt for making the wrong choices; for contradictory compulsions; for complicity.

Like much else that finds its way onto the internet, the poetry in ‘I saw the best memes of my generation’ is fleeting, reactionary and selective with its facts—only ever tangentially concerned with the ‘real’ world. Somehow this book skewers SS utes, flower arrangement, the antiquated forms of Italian Opera, the emerging politics of the climate crisis and the misogynist underbelly of rock and roll with one flukey shot of an arrow. This much anticipated debut collection pins Symes’ viral poems down like delicate butterflies for the pleasure of your eighteenth century drawing room.

Highly Commended in the 2024 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize

In Bed with Animals is a personal poetic exploration of the horror and banality in one woman’s lived experience of gender discrimination. It examines the contemporary world through an ecofeminist lens and considers the way that women, the environment, and animals suffer exploitation. This incendiary debut collection unsettles with its heartfelt ferocity.

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.

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

Whether in the Venetian footsteps of Vivaldi, at the birth of the Owen and Sassoon violins or the score of a Sam Peckinpah film, these poems present a wealth of musical scenarios, all interconnected in their themes, tonality and form. Their reverberations reach across time and space, from England and Italy to the Australian outback, with the visual arts also in the mix. And yet the core of this book is deeply personal, the poet present as a ten-year-old boy, lover, grandfather – or anachronistic witness – at the various trials of life through which creativity and even humour somehow flourishes.

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.

‘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 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

In 1778, Dorothy Wordsworth’s mother died, and the six-year-old Dorothy was sent to live with extended family. She never returned to the family home, and it was not until adolescence that Dorothy became reacquainted with her brother William. The two formed an intense and passionate emotional bond. By 1794 they were living together from that time would rarely be physically separated for more than a few weeks at a time, for the rest of their lives.

Written in the voice of Dorothy, Beloved traces the progression of their relationship, from the ecstatic infatuation of youth onwards, drawing upon Dorothy’s diaries and letters as well as the recollections of friends and family members and literary and biographical scholarship.