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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?

the scuppered lily by owen bullock

the scuppered lily

$19.95

The haiku and senryū in The scuppered lily concern what passes and what we treasure; what amuses us and what confounds us. They record odd, fresh ways of understanding, through the senses and through the imagination. These short poems were written over an eight-year period between 2015 and 2022, published in journals and commended in competitions in Poland, Croatia, the UK and Ireland, US, New Zealand and Australia.

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.

Errances by Dominique Hecq

Errances

$14.95

ByDominique Hecq

‘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

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.

9781764106856-Perfect

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.

This is what it feels like

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.

Peckinpah Suite by Paul Munden

Peckinpah Suite

$19.95

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

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

_Grief_auththeft

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.

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.

Fruits of Exile by Maggie Shapley

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.

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.

The Naming of Clouds by Ross Donlon

The Naming of Clouds

$19.95

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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