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Cactus

$19.95

Throughout his forties and fifties Phillip found himself on a sticky wicket: the grief for his baby son and younger brothers, suicide attempts, self-harming, the premature termination of his career, and the failure of religious belief to explain or console. In and out of psychiatric care, he has been treated for PTSD, severe depression and social anxiety. There are consolations: family, companion greyhounds, Sunshine, the Western Bulldogs and Australian Football, books, the fine and performing arts but, for Phillip, this remains a time of loss and despair. This is, therefore, a collection of lamentations, achingly focused on what it is to live with poor mental health, but it is also a defiant celebration of survival and the redeeming power of familial love, sport and the arts.

Anamnesis

$19.95

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.

All Suspicions Have Been Confirmed

$19.95

Disquieting and deeply moving, Shane Strange’s debut collection inhabits a space that is somehow both intimate, and remote. All Suspicions Have Been Confirmed is marked by precise, pared back language, and immediate, hauntingly resonant imagery: we move through the space and places, the cities, the landscapes of these poems almost as we might move through a film, or a vividly remembered dream.

A Coat of Ashes

$14.95

Jackson’s new collection traverses science and spirituality, philosophy and matter. Drawing from physics, systems theory, Daoism and more, it contemplates profound questions about our place within a world of being. With deft silences and fine observations, these poems explore both modern and ancient paths to knowledge, seeking to ‘fully apprehend nature, including our fellow beings, and foster a reverent respect for it’.

New in 2023Featured

2023 Editions

$240.00

Get all fifteen of our new poetry collections released as they are released 2023

Featuring new work by:

April
Nathan Shepherson, Sandra Renew
May
Ally Chua, Alvin Pang & George Szirtes
June
Erin Shiel, Owen Bullock
July
K A Nelson, Martin Dolan
September
Es Foong, Brendan Ryan, Thabani Tshuma
October
Jennifer Allen, Brent Cantwell
November
Jen Webb, Kerry Greer

Pancakes for Neptune

$19.95

Beginning with a childhood in and around depressed Cornish mining, Pancakes for Neptune is a detonation of neoliberal waste. Bullock understands that conservatism – whether in public or private realms – is, by definition, a protection racket. However, this collection is not an angry one. It sparkles with a rich lyrical and imagist vein, stirring us to dwell on this earth in relationship with others, with respect, rapture and exuberant interest. Owen Bullock’s latest collection showcases his restless experimentalism as well as his sly, generous and quirky sense of fun.

Girl on a Corrugated Roof

$19.95

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.

parallel equators

$19.95

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?

Apostles of Anarchy

$19.95

It’s  the 1970s and 1980s, and Sandra Renew, a young lesbian activist in Far North Queensland, is involved in some of the most politically charged moments in Australian history. From Pine Gap to civil rights marches in Queensland to the first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and beyond, Apostles of Anarchy juxtaposes newspaper headlines and archival material with the personal experience of these struggles. It asks what it is to fight for the acceptance of difference in a discourse of prejudice and hostility.

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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