Poetry Books

The Clambake is the annual culmination of a new poetry project in Newcastle, NSW - 'Cuplet Poetry Night'. Founded by Claire Albrecht in August 2018, the monthly event hosts poets from across Australia and the world.The poems in this anthology cover vast...

Numb and Number collects together poems written between 2011 and 2019. At its core is a confronting sequence of confessional poems which arises from depression and includes poems on the death of the poet's mother. It also includes a number of narrative...

These poems are unflinching in the face of death, yet suffused with the delights of living, from a potato harvest to a walk beside a river. They are in tune with the complexities of the modern world - the unseen environmental impact of war, an...

Material is drawn from his 3-year practice of creating hand-written artist books and is the first time it has been widely available to the public. Mannix's work centres on the documentation and investigation of his experiences of schizophrenia and, what...

In this powerful collection Ross Gillett covers a wide poetic landscape - traditional verse forms, carefully honed free verse, exploratory long sequences and a wealth of shorter poems. He covers an equally wide range of experience: family and childhood,...

Gravity as a physical influence, the weight of gravity, and gravity ofthought and action are central to Andrew Sant's new collection of poems - and sotoo is the means of baffling gravity, not the least by the deployment of wit.Gravity here is also...

perhaps I am willing to be with you every day raising ducks. my heart, for the rest of my life is a window pane cleaned till it shines...I Live Alone is part of a new bilingual Chinese poetry series. This collection of poems, in Chinese and English,...

This is an important and timely book from a mature, perspicacious voice. Phyllis Perlstone shows us a Monash behind the image on the $100 bank note: the engineer, innovator, man-about-town, husband, father, warrior, tactician; his love affairs and...

This very lively collection contains a wide sweep of poems, many of them prize-winning, taking readers on a remarkable journey. Some look to the past, others to the future, but all are of their time: the reverberating now. The tone is contemporary and...

Like many poets, MartinLangford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The neat snakescollected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way ofarticulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they neverthelessretain the...

Judith has an amazing voice and writes poems that make you feel something. That's why I love her poetry. - Vanessa Page in Facebook, 2015After reading Flares I popped it in my bag and carried it with me so I could open it at any time (and I have) and...

A small black cat wakes in the box in which itwas carried to a dump and makes its way home through the drains. The onlychange in the divine realm is that there is no longer anyone or anythingguarding the gates of the dead. - 'Downpayment on a...

This first full-length volume draws from poems written over roughly ten years: prose sequences, sonnets or thereabouts, parody-homages, a metro poem, psychical collaborations, and drawn from small-print chapbooks. Combining a condensed lyricism, collage,...

With unflinching honesty and lyrical precision, Tight Bindings grapples with embodied experiences and moments of transition. Birth, death, sex, illness, desire, and motherhood are all brought into conversation with the stories we tell and the secrets we...

Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia's most polluted urban waterway, the 'Cooks River', to a...

Chester is the first Australian poet to write poetry in the jokey, colloquial style of what is known as the New York school - poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, who threw phrases at the page like an action painting, and treated...

Out of the Blocks is the debut full-length poetry collection from Newcastle based poet Ellen Shelley. Curiosity, memory and deep feeling can be found in these poems that play with the dark edges of the lyrical I and explore the complexity in particular...

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...