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.
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.
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
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
This bilingual Homings and Departures anthology presents the absorbing and compelling poetry of 41 outstanding Australian poets in both English and Mandarin. The anthology is the result of a collaboration between poets, scholars and translators from the China Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University, Western Australia; the International Poetry Studies group at the University of Canberra; and Fudan University in Shanghai. Edited by Lucy Dougan and Paul Hetherington, it reflects the importance of international literary and cultural connections as a way of extending our conceptions of ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’.
2021 is the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, author of the long narrative poetic trilogy, The Divine Comedy. In a time of global pandemic, Dante’s exploration of the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds and humankind’s responsibilities to each other seems particularly relevant, and to commemorate Dante’s anniversary we invited 70 poets from around the world to respond to Dante’s famous work, assisted by a team of seven contributing editors: Paul Munden (UK), Nessa O’Mahony (Ireland), Paul Hetherington (Australia), Alvin Pang (Singapore), Priya Sarukkai Chabria (India), Moira Egan (Italy) and David Fenza (US).
Edited by Paul Munden and Nessa O’Mahony.
The free online version of Divining Dante is now available here.
An early exchange of Christmas presents leads to a violent outcome for a young drunk couple. A schoolboy finds himself at the centre of a cruel playground bullying ritual. A teenage girl lies to her mother about a sexual assault involving her little sister. A father ruins grand final day for the son who idolises him.
The thirteen stories in Luke Johnson’s debut collection do not shy away from life’s brutalities. Nor do they overlook those moments of genuine intimacy, humour and revelation that imbue the tragic with purpose and with pathos. Set in regional Australia in an era before mobile phones and the internet, these stories will remind you of who and what we are beneath all the cool digital interfaces: animals, burning with ferocity for a mouthful of life’s flesh.
This anthology collects 10 of the finest contemporary women poets working in Japan today and offers translations that reinterpret the work as poetry in English. The result is an edgy, compelling, beautiful group of works, presented in a bi-lingual format, that challenges perceptions of contemporary Japanese life, culture and history.
In Incantations, Subhash Jaireth responds through a series of short prose pieces to portraits of famous and everyday Australians in an attempt to rethink the role of place, identity and the self. It is an ekphrastic exercise, in that it reinterprets an artwork in writing, but it is also a lyrical exploration of what art can mean: its power to move, to know, and to feel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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
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
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
