AustLit

'Theory of Colours takes as its title and point of departure the influential nineteenth-century treatise on colour by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. In Li’s third full-length collection, colour — and its absence — is at once subject, structural principle and medium. Moving from the distant past, through the fleeting, unstable present, and into a series of speculative futures, the book elaborates worlds both familiar and strange — a country estate, a small town, a grand hotel, a tower. Informed by the spectral practices of early photography and cinema, as well as the visual and thematic conventions of ghost stories, westerns and science fiction, Li’s narratives of text and image are unsettling explorations of sequence and time, absence and haunting.' (Publication summary)

''Dan Disney's accelerations & inertias is a remarkable work of self-critiquing, inverting hybridity. This is a restive book in which new skyscrapers and museums, temples and consumer fetishism are complementary, and not necessarily in tension. In these ‘distillations’ there is no quietism, and the ‘museum of the future’ is a question with fear and doubt in the air about it. The key to this work – the best of Disney’s, I think – remains the critique of a crisis of capital, a deep respect for environment, a deep respect for culture and its complexities, a wonder mixed with a toughness of observation and understanding of what being an observer means.'' (Publication summary)

(Production summary)

'A Bee’s Guide to Bothering takes its cue from Leonardo da Vinci’s observation that the bee does not simply collect and use but digests and transforms. It considers firstly, how our understanding of social interactions might borrow from those of the more-thanhuman and secondly, that we need to reconceptualise existence as closely connected to the more-than-human. As Maurice Maeterlinck noted as far back as 1901, “If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.” As its title suggests, the collection plays upon the dual meaning of bothering as an act of care as much as an act of disturbance. The central question driving A Bee’s Guide to Bothering is: how might we creatively draw together these strands of care and activism? Taking a specifically feminist approach, the poetry collection considers how experiences of intimacy and labour have been shaped by cultural hierarchies and divisions around gender, race, capital, and nation. It explores how poetry might highlight existing social and ecological vulnerability and unsettle prescribed roles. In imaginatively teasing out and beginning the work of transforming relations, how might poetry lead to more sustainable forms of belonging and solidarity? The manuscript has developed out of “The Antagonist’s Care Pack” which was shortlisted for the 2019 Helen Anne Bell Bequest Poetry Award.' (Publication summary)

'Gravidity and Parity explores the narrative opportunities of pregnancy loss, pregnancy and early motherhood set against the unfolding experience of the COVID 19 pandemic.

'With bleak humour, crisp language and the intricate realities of the body, Gravidity and Parity considers the natal taboo while documenting the strange, performance of life celebrated, mourned, connected and disconnected under lockdown.' (Publication summary)

'I don't sleep much or very well (I have a recent book of poetry entitled Insomnia!), but, when I do, I often have supervivid dreams. It is said that in the time of Covid-19, many people are speaking of having more vivid dreams than usual, and though the poems in this manuscript are not-specifically 'Covid-19 poems', at certain points of the manuscript they certainly make contact with this overwhelming reality and condition of crisis. But this is essentially a book in a lifecycle of trying to confront and consider the impacts of colonial agribusiness mono agricultural practices on Australia, and how it is or isn't possible to write about these issues within the conventions of the pastoral tradition of literature. Can 'pastoralism' and environmentalism intersect in meaningful ways or is it all a colonial ruse? As a committed environmentalist and human rights landrights justice campaigner, my poetry necessarily considers the place I work out of (largely wheatbelt Western Australia), and the problems of writing poetry 'about' rurality and ecology, as well as addressing the ongoing colonialism. This new book is an attempt to push my anti, post, counter, and radical pastoral to the point where it also becomes a means of considering where agricultural culpabilities intersect with personal histories and behaviours, where creativity that comes out of a critique of invasive and damaging wrongs is in itself up for question. So this is a work of self-critique, questioning, and also aspiration to vividly confront and find ways through this crisis of presence. The 'Australian Pastoral' is a construct, a propaganda device that suits all sorts of oppressive modes, and is easily a place to retreat into even when it is being questioned: I am trying to bring all this into eclogic discussion, to contest it further as part of a long and linguistically diverse process of contestation. This book 'connects' with other books on 'pastoral' I have written over the decades, including other recent work (in progress) on odes and eclogues (longer pieces largely) - but this is a collection of shorter poems. The book could be subtitled: Eclogix.' (Publication summary)

'Capacity is a volume with two chambers. The first, 'Modern Woman Sonnets', comprises twenty-six wild and precise love poems, which can be traced back to those of the Renaissance original Louise Labé. These sonnets are versions, hardly, or echoes, clearly, of Labé’s, and perpetuate the internal logic of her love. The book’s second part, 'Demonics', contains poems of a dark and numinous music, contemplating myriad forms of possession. The lyrical, transformative structures of Holt's poems provide ‘a field of force’ for the daimonic to play, within the self and without. The darting humour and lucid astonishments of her previous work can be found here in Capacity.' (Publication summary)
 

'Against the backdrop of a world in crisis these poems speak of grief and beauty, of spirituality and resilience. Poems responding to nature, ekphrastic poems and meditations on the randomness of fate sit alongside more personal poems of loss, while in the title sequence dream narratives are interspersed with often short, highly visual poems in an extended questioning of what it means to live and write in the face of mortality.' (Publication summary)

'Moxie traverses the office landscape of our collective psyche, restlessly moving between the interior monologue of daily ruminations and epic-like career narratives lying in wait. The hustle gives way to survival, cresting back into gritty victories via the feminist acquisition of corporate language. Open-plan everything, filing cabinets bursting; the promise of the ladder, beckoning you in.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Where Only the Sky had Hung Before disassembles and reassembles language found in the textual wastelands of the internet and the literary canon. Across many spectrums, from slippery lists of factoids to indices of figurative language, from a pantoum of #staywoke tweets to deep cuts and collage treatments of The Waste Land, The Argonauts, and The Left Hand of Darkness, these poems mobilise tensions and continuities between form and fluidity, gender and genre, literature and spam, childhood and adulthood, the virtual and the real.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Book 2 is made of 3 microbooks – Blazar, Chorastics, Disk – & comprises 30 poems in total. Blazars; black hole objects with jet axes pointing towards earth. Chorastics; a chorus, a human cluster. Disk; the shape of some galaxies but also a compact storage device. Each microbook; equal number of lines for each register. Blazar in 3 registers (258 lines), Chorastics in 4 (680 lines), Disk in 5 (360). Ends with music.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Archival-Poetics offers a unique contribution to Australian poetry through a new way to write into, and out from, the State’s Aboriginal archives and from a Narungga woman’s standpoint. It will demonstrate an embodied reckoning with the colonial archive and those traumatic, contested and buried episodes of history that inevitably return to haunt. Family records at the heart of this work include South Australia’s Aboriginal Protection Board and Children’s Welfare Board records, highlighting assimilation policy measures targeting Aboriginal girls for removal into indenture domestic labour. Three interconnected threads underpin this Archival-poetic writing, and each thread is expanded as the theoretical heart to each section of the work: On Blood Memory – a reclamation of re-imagined histories through cultural identity (blood), narrative (memory) and connection to country (land); On Haunting as a ‘way of knowing’ – an active and honouring response to that which is silent and hidden; the seething and felt, yet unseen presence of colonial violence or unfinished business; On the Colonial Archive – a poetic spotlight on the colonial State and those key institutions, repositories and systems that maintain and perpetuate dominant discourses and representations on Indigenous peoples and histories. Each section of the work will be a potent, multi-textual artefact in its own right that centres the affective, transformative and honouring dimensions of haunting, where the potency of place, colonial-histories and blood-memory collide. They each bear witness to the state’s archivisation processes and the revelation of what is both absent and present on the record. As a trilogy offering in one volume of work, it collectively considers important questions of representation, surveillance and agency; and questions of power that resonate in our daily lives, on and through the colonial archive. It also bears witness to individual and collective loss in order to actively honour and contribute, beyond the local, to larger counter-hegemonic narratives of colonial history. This work demonstrates a critical-creative way of decolonising and transforming the colonial archive through poetic refusal, resistance and memory-making; a poetry that also engages theory, images and primary source archival material.'

'Birth Plan is LK Holt’s fourth full-length collection is a generous, sharp-edged, technically masterful and expansive collection from one of Australia’s foremost female poets. These poems are transformative, fiercely feminist, unrelenting in their clarity, and display a rare mastery of the musicality of language. Exploring the realities of mothering and loving in the late Anthropocene, Holt’s work is rigorous in its exploration and evocation of psychological truths and half-truths. Fearless and darkly humorous, these are poems that turn on a phoneme and give full life and song to the shimmering uncertainties and hard realities of selfhood.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness represents a new departure in my writing. It is a single book-length poem made up of fragments and shorter pieces in varied styles that build towards the last line, which is the book's title. I have aimed at a sparse, open simplicity in this book, a clarity and brevity sufficient to carry the weight of the space I am now in, with my illnesses, my partner's cancer and the acute sense of time's limits. The poems question what it might mean to live and write in the immediate knowledge of death, what response we can find when out of the blue we, or the one we love, are told we have a very limited time, three or five years, to live. At the artistic as well as the personal level, there is also a need for balance in the work, as beauty, tenderness, the presence of the natural world, light as well as dark, insist on their place in the poem.'

Source: Author's blurb.

'Music Made Visible is a poetic biography on the life and works of George Balanchine, one of the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century. Jessica L. Wilkinson explores the possibilities and imaginative leaps that poetry can offer to the writing of a life. Her poetic series of Balanchine ‘ballets’ unfold from his early life as a student at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, through his engagement at Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, to his later co-founding and development of the New York City Ballet. Wilkinson’s poems are attuned to the ephemeral qualities of music and movement that were so vital to her subject’s life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Thom Sullivan’s debut collection of poems, Carte Blanche, traverses the exactitudes of place and time – from a distinctively Australian suburbia, to farming landscapes in South Australia’s Mount Lofty Ranges, to Australia’s renowned Great Ocean Road, and the interior terrains of consciousness and perception. The poems are memorable, succinct in their expression, precise in their effect, and notable for their innovative use of syntax and punctuation. Carte Blanche is a collection of poems that’s finely realised and keenly felt.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.