Literature Books

Philip Salom's major new collection explores human and natural existence - as life-force and loss, and for diverse symptoms of achievement and folly. His intense scrutiny gives air to the unavoidable complexity of voices raised and voices ignored...

Re-collected over six decades, these love poems show Michael Sharkey to be a true master of the sonnet form. They demonstrate Sharkey the poet at his very best, not only dextrous, but generous, touching, wide-ranging and surprising. The poems are as...

Within this robust and delicate collection, Morgan Yasbincek simultaneously explores and invokes a constellation of poetic voices that all, ultimately, resolve into the nothing which gives them birth.Presence gives way to absence and absence hints at...

i'd be lying if i was telling the truth In axolotl waltz, Nathan Shepherdson steers a rusty trolley with its wobbly wheel as he haunts the aisles in the Supermarket of Casual Koans (SOCK). What he can't find, he invents, or at other times puts items...

'The Diwan of Nawid is like nothing else in Australian poetry - a spiritual text of sublime beauty in which we follow the struggles, questionings, and exhortations of Nawid, a character you will come to love for the way in which he lays before...

'If, as has been said, Sant is "an important, innovative poet" with a "penetrating eye for the hidden geometries of meaning" it is because, whatever his subject, the vision it draws out of him is there to be his and the subject, like the...

Infantilisms concerns the work of serious culture, which for the philosopher Charles Fourier (the presiding spirit here) is deathly. Infantilism, by contrast, is the work of the passions (work as passion, which is true poesis): Fourier's...

This debut collection of poetry explores the threads and gaps in family and national story - both oral and archival - to connect multiple generations of migration, separation, adoption, secrecy and reunion. The poems connect seemingly distant times and...

Moon Wrasse is a voyage through transformation and disenfranchised grief: parenthood ambivalence, queer infertility, female-to-male gender transition from the perspective of a life partner; a navigation of identity in a time of climate crisis. It is also...

It might be that Madame de Lafayette's novel of passion is one of the greatest in the genre. It is closer to the declamatory theatre of Racine than to anything in the robust tradition of the English novels of Fielding or Smollett or Dickens. It...

Though she was only fourteen years old, like many other Jews in Eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement in 1907, Rebecca Lieberman gathered her few belongings and left for the United States. What follows is a unique and poetic story of history, war,...

This long-awaited collection by major Australian poet, Jill Jones, selects from her 13 full length volumes, published over three decades, as well as from numerous new and uncollected poems, and includes an introduction by the poet. Rather than a...

Julie is intrigued with art and art history, infatuated with Italy and obsessed with the news and with moving. She loves responding to writing challenges in playful and collage-y ways. Expect surprises.

A life lived with melancholy, its spikes, its other rhythms, its insistence. In the end, when we learn this part of us is part of us, is not our enemy, when we live long enough to eschew fear of judgments social, medical, personal eschew the idea of...

An extension of O'Flynn's previous work Einstein's Brain floats somewhere between the thistle and the hug. It contains great variety in terms of subject matter, form, style, and mood. There is a typical wit we have come to expect, a penchant for the...

Set around Cessnock in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, camping underground is a brutal, lyrical and cinematic narrative that lays out the scattered fragments of Kelly Edwards's life before and after the political violence she is implicated in...

Increments of the Everyday is a collection of poetry which traces processes of change, loss and the possibilities of recovery. The diverse experiences of grief, injury, pandemic lockdowns and responses to varying life experiences are explored in five...

I Have Decided To Remain Vertical, Gayelene Carbis's second book of poetry, continues the scenes and preoccupations of her debut collection Anecdotal Evidence: childhood memories, lovers, therapy, Carnegie, poetry and confession-though with the...

A selection drawn from their various intoxicating books (Airborne Dogs, Nutters Without Fetters, Poems of Relative Unlikelihood, The Wallah Group, The Gutman Variations (their study of Jacques Lacan), the verse novel The Ferrara Poems - later filmed -...

But Now is Phyllis Perlstone's artistic statement of intent. In this book, Perlstone employs her characteristic fractured syntax and extraordinary visual focus, leaving you 'dizzy with seeing'.Unusually, though, she allows us to draw near her, in her...

Having reflected for many years on his motivation for writing poetry and the subjects that obsess him, Mark realises that his writing primarily involves memorialising and eulogising the overlooked and forgotten. Not only people but places and objects...

Who Was by Alex Quel questions the very basis of poetic creativity. Here language speaks in the voices of heteronyms who write of mortality and love in the tense concentrated form that goes as far as poetry has any right to reach. This is a book about...

A logical continuation from Albrecht's debut chapbook pinky swear, handshake is a space of anxious play. It combines conceptual photography with sharp and disarming poetry, investigating personal and public tensions between environment, desire, isolation...

This collection of poems is both celebration and elegy, paying homage to the everyday beauty of the natural world and documenting and protesting its degradation and neglect. The poems move through distinct threads: poems of ocean and river; poems that...

This is a selection from a poet who believes that Australia still has countless stories to tell, re-tell and imagine. These are works by someone intrigued by the varieties of poetic forms, who is a lover of verse satire and a believer in the...

These poems seek to evoke the often subtle yet ultimately profound shifts in awareness which occur during meditation and in daily life, as the non-dual perspective enables a seeing through, or past, the formulations of experience which a dualistic...

Book of Mother is an exploration of mother/son relationship and of language and consciousness (as these are entered and left). This book is an intimate encounter with dementia as lived experience. Words are an important way into the world and when we...

Recent books from Martin Langford have addressed specific themes: Ground explored the evolution of Australian spaces, while Eardrum focused on music. The Boy from the War Veterans' Home, however, represents a return to the miscellaneous sources from...

Known for their allusiveness and indirection, Bolton's poems can also be jaw-droppingly direct, as they make their way towards resolutions never clearly within their sights, achieved rather than aimed for. Fantastic Day performs philosophy,...

'This collection opens with a set of double-glazed windows, blasted by bushfire before they could even be installed, gazing only at "vistas of soil". The poems move through a series of landscapes, both internal and external, experiencing the elements in...

Born in dire poverty but writing poetry all his life, even when he ran a successful business, Xifeng Yedu is one of the Chinese oral poets who doesn't belong but must write his kind of oral poetry that mixes politics with sex and transcends them, with a...

A multiple-award winner, widely published at home and abroad, and translated into many languages, Xiao Xiao is known for her sharp take on China's human rights record with a poetry as piercingly penetrating as personal, with vignettes of life portrayed...

A long civilisation produces poets and entrepreneurs alike. But a long civilisation like China produces poet-entrepreneurs and entrepreneur-poets, or even entrepoetreneurs. That's a major difference between China and Australia. Zhang Chunhua is...

The motivation behind this anthology is to create a collection of poems and reflections which serve as a gift for people in hospital, and for their loved ones and staff who may be supporting them during the anxieties of illness. The anthology is also...

Geologists and archaeologists use spirit level tools to find horizontal levels in ground or rock. Similarly, the poems in Spirit Level search for elusive balance points between memory and lived terrain, between past and present lives, between grief and...

In Glass Flowers, Diane Fahey explores many kinds of space - the enclosed spaces of rooms, art galleries, hospital wards, prehistoric caves, the airy, flowing spaces of gardens, and the sky's infinite life. Her intense engagement with the...

'Martin Johnston wrote, 'If out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry, what / do we make of our quarrels with Canberra?' Save As works to see these things together: memoir, elegy, politics and a feeling for earth. Its poems are...

Sea Scale comprises thirty new poems and a generous selection from Brook Emery's previous five volumes. From and dug my fingers in the sand, his first book, to Have Been and Are, his most recent, reviewers have noted the fluency and tactility of his...

Hear the Art is the essential poetry-as-art collection, loaded with Richard Tipping's elegant, wry and telling concrete poems made as sculpture and as picture. He is fascinated by words found within words, and articulating their iterations.Tipping works...

The sonnet is a classic lyric form that has beguiled and perplexed poets for over seven hundred years. In this, her thirteenth collection, Jordie Albiston re-invents the sonnet structure, trading meter for syllabics, and employing fifteen lines in lieu...

The quality of Australian poetry has never been higher, nor the number of distinctive voices greater.A landmark publication, this collection presents the astonishing achievements of Australian poetry during the last quarter of a century. Over ten years...

Duncan Hose is from the softslang line of of the chansonnier, whose reference points range between Trefoil Island, Melbourne and Coney Island. He is the author of Rathaus and One Und Bacchus.

A House by the River journeys through the six years Diane Fahey lived with her mother, Patricia, as her carer, and ends at a point five years after her death. Both the challenges and radiant moments of the relationship of mother and daughter are given...

In the late 1930s an apprentice potter made a solemn pledge with some of his young work mates to meet up on New Year's Day, in the year 2000, in the famous Long Bar of the Hotel Australia. But the reunion never took place because, while sixty years later...

Rae Desmond Jones' poetry specialises in precisely observed social and political phenomena. People and their often anti-social impulses, as acted out in tension with their social context, give his poetry the power to unsettle and disturb, while...

Australian ravens is a book of mourning, celebration, family, misgiving, lies and caution. The three long poems in this book, 'Broken', 'Not being in Kyoto' and 'The Blue Gum', each extend the questioning of memory, place and the past that featured in...

Tender poems on the death of his wife, witty Philip Larkin apercus, meditations on the spiritual need of Australians for Europe, hard-eyed satire as a political fixer dismisses as out-of-date the instruments of torture in the Tower of London: John...

This New & Selected Poems is a substantial and long-awaited compilation from one of Australia's most accomplished poets, a retrospective spanning more than thirty years. The New Poems section, 'Towards the Equator', represents Alex Skovron's sixth...