Poetry Books

Prose poetry is a resurgent literary form in the English-speaking world and has been rapidly gaining popularity in Australia. Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington have gathered a broad and representative selection of the best Australian prose poems...

This limited edition 3-pack of Running Water Community Press titles is a perfect gift for summer reading. It includes three titles from the world's first ever First Nations author run co-operative publisher:Living In Hope: the complete memoirs...

InA Bird Called Elaeus, poet and translator David Constantine presents a selection of poems fromThe Greek Anthology, a collection of around 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by around 300 authors.The Greek Anthologyis a marvellous salvage...

Featuring ten collage illustrations by the author,Helen Ivory's new poetry collectionConstructing a Witchfixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity.In this collection, the witch appears as the barren,...

What the Earth Seemed to Say is a powerful collection of more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from one of America's most daring and courageous poets. With its 'radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest...

The award-winning, genre-crossing writer demonstrates her power as a funkadelic and formidable feminist voice in this rich and beautiful collection of verse and image—a multi-part retrospective that traverses time, space, and reality to illuminate the...

Sometimes it's difficult to take that first step into your future and embrace the unknown. This illustrated collection of poetry and essays empowers you to embrace your next adventure with confidence and grace, drawing on invaluable lessons from nature...

A charming, clever, and original collection of more than 100 spine poems–a popular form of found poetry composed by arranging book spines—illustrated with 110 full-color photographs.Easy to create and share online, spine poems—also known as collage...

A raw, honest and heartfelt poetry collection from Taz Alam – for the tough times, the great times, and everything in between. Depressed, but it’s fine.Anxious, but it’s fine.Heartbroken, but it’s fine.When you’re ready to embrace how you really feel, I...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars…First published in 1855, and edited, revised and expanded over thirty years, ‘Leaves of...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION'Vivid and empowering' GILLIAN ANDERSON'A stunning book’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO‘Dazzling’ TARA WESTOVER‘A story about hope, imagination and resilience’ GUARDIAN An award-winning, inspiring memoir of...

A celebration of hope. An encounter with grace. A restoration of the heart. A healing of wounds. An anthem of freedom. This illustrated collection of poetry and prose invites you to stumble into the sunlight and delight in the wild and boundless grace...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Though lovers be lost love shall not;And death shall have no dominion.’As a child growing up in South Wales, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with words. In adulthood his...

"There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery." Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the first Canticle in the epic poetic masterpiece The Divine Comedy, is now available in an exquisite hardcover edition featuring a foiled cover and...

In this bold hybrid collection of poetry, flash fiction, and Afrofuturism sci-fi, the award-winning interdisciplinary writer and author of Side Notes from the Archivist explores what happens when god is a Black woman in a town. What happens...

In the midst of the hurt and the mundane, the questions and the not yets, you can forget just how far you have come. This illustrated collection of poetry and essays invites you to reclaim moments of brokenness, division, and pain and re-envision them...

A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowski’s best unpublished and uncollected poems Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to...

A classic in the Bukowski poetry canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical, exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.A book that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject...

‘The best poet in America’ Jean Genet‘He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels’ Leonard CohenThe definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark Here is...

A ground-breaking collection of First Nations Australia LGBTQIA+ poets, writers and storytellers published to commemorate Sydney WorldPride being held on the unceded lands of the Gadigal, Cammeraygal, Bidigal, Dharawal and Dharug Nations.Edited by Alison...

Published to commemorate the author's 100th birthday, this wide-ranging and thoughtful collection reflects on history, colonisation, family, childhood, Aboriginal Dreaming, traditions and storytelling, working lives and people.Sometimes wistful,...

'The poems in Sometimes's collection deftly transcend both spatial scales and time scales. From one line to another we careen across the universe. We fast-forward from the first picosecond of stuff forming in the universe to a Christmas card,...

'Alex Creece's Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a reckless, glorious, grotty revolution. It's an insubordinate 'kissyface of cobwebs' that sticks it to capitalism, heteronormativity and the patriarchy.Quotably horny and delightfully vulgar, Potty...

For Varatharajan, all communication is an art defined by authenticity rather than decadence. These poems do not drink and dial, hey do not hit 'send' too soon. In this manner they are a balm to current hyperactive expectations of social responsiveness...

Gibson's fragmentary style favours standalone single lines or short sentences to exemplify episodic thinking and the discontinuities of broken narrative. He engages cultures in scraps and shards in this savvy and unique collection.Where does it take...

Omar Sakr's poetry consists of rich and convincing detail charged with presence and particularity; his poetic voice is so firmly planted and immersed in the world around him that the urgency of his images and rhythms is completely convincing. His complex...

'Hemensley reads his poetry in a warm accent of old Hampshire and more recent Dorset overlaid with Melbourne, unconsciously abstracting his past. This book is not a harvest of words but a mapping of fields, and paths, from impressions distilled through...

They are not just words whistling on the wind. They come laden with other gifts. With a whole place: Melbourne. It makes you wonder what elements must thus congeal to sustain the songs, the poems, across all these pages without once faltering, without...

Eh? You want bodies, blood, sex, gore, damning gods, raw uppercuts?Why, yes. Pooja Mittal Biswas welcomes you into the ring of identity and the hunt for an honest and rapier self.Glove up.'Confessional poetry can deteriorate into fetishism, in Biswas's...

A collection, written in English and Scots, that explores immigration, home and place.'When I first left my home, the gnawing ache for all I'd left behind family, friends, my land, my whole life made me numb and thrawn. Weeping and sobbing bubblin an...

**Shortlisted, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2023, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry**In this new collection by a seasoned master, Kim Cheng Boey moves between Singapore and Australia, youth and middle age places and times rendered in vivid,...

Dan Hogan's Secret Third Thing is a hyper-real comment on this hyper-real moment: it is suffused with internet culture and reections on the lives we live, now, largely online. What characterises Hogan's poetry is the way that, each time we come close to...

A post-apocalyptic tale of kin, connection and environmental loss.'The crisis is upon us, but abstraction is a bulwark. Deafness, everywhere. We have come to an edge. I want to find a way of taking the truth into my body, and then putting it down into...

'The only Sundays I looked forward to were spent with my beloved Australian nanna Kathleen Mary McCarthy. I would sit with Nanna McC - listening to her stories unwind - and watch her pickle onions and brew ginger beer for Sister Kate's fte. She...

Says O'Keefe about her collection: 'Held under an incorrect adverb, the slowness of this book is expressed as intransigent buffering and refusal of optimisation. The book is shaped by a stubborn commitment to inclusive imprecision which seeks...

The labour never finishes. Astrid Lorange speaks of building a poetics - intensive and intentional - as a way of perceiving the world of relations in their shadow, every poem here requests an attentiveness to the relations of our lives, to the entwining...

Philosophical questions of reality and duality underpin many of the poems in Zenobia Frost's After the Demolition, leading to a sense of rebuilding and remembrance in the aftermath of abodes. Frost's poetic is a kind of antipodean neo-Gothic,...

Australians hear the call of Country, but without knowledge of the history and the lives of its animals and plants, that call is confused and loses itself in opal fields and vainglorious stockman's museums. Follow Crisp: not for her the umbrella on the...

*Shortlisted for the SPN Book of the Year Award 2020*Nganajungu Yagu is dedicated to Papertalk Green's mother, and is built around selected correspondence between Yagu and Daughter. It gently reminds us of the sacrifices made by our matriarchs over time...

In Walk Back Over, Wiradjuri woman - read: poet, academic, historian, teacher - Jeanine Leane takes off our wallpaper to reveal the personal and political layers of a nuanced history. With Leane, we walk back over history pages, walk back over the night...

In A J Carruthers's new poetry collection, collisions between disparate languages, histories and ideas - each with their own distinct voices - are staged through a visually arresting and innovative approach to form. Drawing on media such as musical...

These are poems that reflect many aspects of the human condition and the individual, from poems about love and death, the family, science, the natural world and historical figures such as Ned Kelly and Charles Darwin. Her sequence on Ned Kelly...

A fearless and honest exploration of queer First Nations identity, and a vibrant celebration of imperfection and personal growth, if this is the end is a stunning exploration of what it means to work through childhood trauma and love yourself in the...

'in ember and ash / the heart of the Noongar Nation beats buried...'Refugia is an unparalleled work of vision and political fury from Noongar and Yawuru poet and scholar Elfie Shiosaki. Inspired by the beeliar (Swan River) and the NASA James Webb Space...

Winner 2015 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship a partnership between the State Library ofQueensland's black&write! Indigenous Writing and Editing Project and Magabala BooksFrom a remarkable new voice in Indigenous writing comes...