AustLit

'Anna Jacobson’s intriguing collection Amnesia Findings won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize in 2018. In this verse, incorporates many skeins of fine silk like a brocade as the poet deftly handles the varied subject matter of mental illness, family, and Jewish faith and culture. She takes as her muse the concept of passing: passing away, the Passover, and memories of the past. Here are motifs of knitting and needlework, uncovering things buried, and musical expression. Innovative in subject matter and imagery, this collection of poetry pulses with the sensations of a troubled yet brilliant mind. Jacobson maps dreamscapes and pins emotions to corkboard like a nineteenth-century explorer-cum-naturalist seeking the meaning of existence.' (Introduction)

'Natalie D-Napoleon’s First Blood is a systematic demolition and rebuilding of the construct of girlhood. With an assured hand, D-Napoleon succinctly expresses the seemingly ineffable. Often, her keen stylus writes afresh over and across palimpsestic earlier texts in a processing of erasing, effacing, and replacing. D-Napoleon’s aesthetic is spare but neither sparse nor Spartan, as these poems are servings of selfhood that remain generous even in the face of antagonism.' (Introduction)

'Jena Woodhouse’s unassuming collection, Green Dance: Tamborine Mountain Poems, reads like a humble offering and happy acceptance of hospitality. The chapbook came about when a representative of Calanthe Collective, a poetry group based on Tamborine Mountain, contacted Woodhouse after finding some of her early poems about the mountain among the late poet Val Vallis’s papers in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland. On many occasions in the 1980s and 1990s, Woodhouse and her family stayed as guests at Vallis’s Tamborine Mountain retreat, Abydos, where she wrote her first poems about this beautiful peak in the Gold Coast Hinterland. As Woodhouse phrases it, when Calanthe offered her this opportunity, “the interrupted dance was able to resume.” This is a lovely metaphor, indicative of the sort of imagery to be found in this book of poetry with its themes of heritage and history, nature and ecology, and hosting and hospitality.' (Introduction)