AustLit

'Antigone Kefala is one of the most significant of the Australian writers who have come from elsewhere; it would be difficult to overstate the significance of her life and work in the culture of this nation. Over the last half-century, her poetry and prose have reshaped and expanded Australian literature and prompted us to re-examine its premises and capacities. From the force of her poetic imagery and the cadences of her phrases and her sentences to the large philosophical and historical questions she poses and to which she responds, Kefala has generated in her writing new ways of living in time, place and language. Across six collections of poetry and five prose works, themselves comprising fiction, non-fiction, essays and diaries, she has mapped the experience of exile and alienation alongside the creativity of a relentless reconstitution of self. Kefala is also a cultural visionary. From her rapturous account of Sydney as the place of her arrival in 1959, to her role in developing diverse writing cultures at the Australia Council, to the account of her own writing life amongst a community of friends and artists in Sydney Journals (2008), she has reimagined the ways we live and write in Australia.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'A startlingly frank take on modern femininity, Michele Seminara’s Suburban Fantasy combines finely crafted narratives with lyrical artistry and sure-footed eloquence. This is raw, fiery, firebrand feminist writing that manages to artfully co-exist with giddying intimacy and poignant soul-bearing.'

Source : publication summary

'Between 2012 and 2019 Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis, Inge Kral and Jennifer Green worked together to make an enduring record of endangered verbal arts in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands communities of Western Australia. They filmed traditional Ngaanyatjarra tjinytjatjunku or mirlpa (telling stories while drawing in the sand) with women and girls. They then loaded up some iPads with a drawing app and filmed younger women using this new technology to draw with as they told stories about everyday life in their desert communities.

'The sixteen iPad stories are presented in i-Tjuma: Ngaanyatjarra stories from the Western Desert of Central Australia and readers can view the films with a linked QR codes. The stories burst with colour and originality, blending tradition and innovation and providing a unique window on the storytelling arts of an ancient culture.

'Story writers: Joella Butler; Katrina Giles; Bethany Cooke; Claudine Butler; Phillipa Butler; Kresna Cameron; Delisha Reid; Donisha Yunkett; Trisha Lewis; Susan Reid'(Publication summary) 

 'It is important for us to read our own stories and to keep the tradition of our language for our future generations.' — Dereck Harris, Chairman, Ngaanyatjarra Council

'In the Time of their Lives is a wonderful book that honours the extraordinary heritage and historical trajectory of Western Desert (Ngaanyatjarra) speech, the importance of speech and the management of its varieties with a complexity and insight we have rarely seen in print. With a blend of interviews in translation, close examples of speech, first person testimony, photographs, film clips and historical material, Kral and Ellis have brought attention to the changing sensory world of Yarnangu, of sight sound and bodily experience as central to Ngaanyatjarra sociality and personhood. It is rare, indeed, to have such respectful research flow from the intimate and personal perspective of a committed member and active participant in Ngaanyatjarra life.' — Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University. (Publication summary)

'Randolph Stow (1935–2010) was a writer who resisted critical containment. His complete oeuvre of eight novels, a children’s novella, a libretto, translation work and several collections of poetry presents an accomplished and impressive literary legacy.

Kate Rendell said:

'“Commencing this project with the simple ambition to present a critical collection responding to the full breadth of Randolph Stow’s work, I extended an invitation to literary scholars and critics whose work I knew addressed his writing. The responses were encouraging and generous, confirming the wide reach of interest in Stow’s life and literature. It reminded me that while not as comprehensively studied as some of his contemporaries, Stow continues to enjoy the support of broad public and academic readership.”

'The collection republishes a number of significant essays but also presents new readings acknowledging the remarkable skill as well as the limitations of Stow’s literary imagining. All are a testimony to the resonance of Stow’s writing while acknowledging the critical complexities of his work.' (Publication summary)

In his first days as Prime Minister, John Curtin presented himself to the press as a self-styled intellectual who loved sport and relaxing, when he could, with a book, beach walk, game of cards or fossick in the garden. He also revealed that he enjoyed poetry so much that he held to a Sunday night poetry ritual. Curtin was Australia’s third wartime Prime Minister, Labor’s eighth Prime Minister, and the first Prime Minister from a Western Australian electorate.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Fish Work brings the great barrier reef into poetic focus, exploring not just the fish that occupy the reefs but that vast variety of life-forms – including human – that make the reef a uniquely diverse environment. Developed over three years of field-work, during which time the poet lived and worked alongside marine researchers, Fish Work asks us to reconsider what it means to live with other beings, human and extra-than-human.

'Blending the language of scientific research with the language of popular culture and her familiar conversational register, Fish Work is unlike any other book of poetry currently available in Australia.

'This collection represents the first dedicated poetic investigation into the Great Barrier Reef in a time a climate change, paying particular attention to the far northern Great Barrier Reef, specifically Lizard Island Research Station where the poet spent several months over several years undergoing fieldwork with the scientific researchers in residence.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'This substantial collection holds the reader with its unique voice and finely crafted language. In each section, the poems build on and inform each other, while their major themes thread throughout with compassion and wry humour.

'Whether as flaneur or master print-maker, Ross Jackson takes us through suburban streets and interior spaces, relationships, the 'other', street life, isolation, ageing and death, regret, and haiku-like moments of connection or joy. Here are the accommodations of restricted lives, the edgy Summer Frying on Oats Street, Hopper-like interiors, a small elegy for two dogs. We find 'night parrots of the street', and 'deep wells of our dignity'. This is a collection to be savoured.' - Dick Alderson

''Ross Jackson is an astute observer of life, the aloneness of people and otherness. Delivered in a com-pelling conversational manner, the poems traverse the suburbs of Perth and beyond to other places and cultures: Sydney, Bali, Japan and America. At times about an ageing self in the present day, animals in particular dogs feature as constant companions. The work is filled with detailed images that can be witty, sad or macabre, quirky, cheeky, or painterly. This is a delightfully entertaining collection.' - Carolyn Abbs' (Publication summary)

''Anh and Lucien is a compelling celebration of male desire and intimacy –  and also a gripping clash of cultures and ideologies. Danger and death pervade Tony Page's sensuous and sensitive evocation of a risky love affair in an alluring, unsettled place and time, Indochina 1940. Intrigue and art, passion and espionage interweave to drive and doom the relationship between Anh, a young revolutionary, and Lucien, a disaffected French bureaucrat. Page skillfully deploys alternating dramatic monologues to increase the tension as loyalty and betrayal merge towards Lucien's final sacrifice.' -- Jan Owen 

''The story of desire between two men is told with exquisite beauty and restraint using prose poems, epistolary poems, found poems and documentary poems to build from suspense a tragedy that is also a victory for humanity over small-mindedness and oppression.' --  Jennifer Harrison'

Source: publisher's blurb

'Not Always Diplomatic chronicles the life of a pioneer in international diplomacy and a career that has spanned the globe. Sue Boyd has been the head of Australian diplomatic missions in Fiji, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Bangladesh. She also had postings at the United Nations in New York and in the former East Germany. Sue Boyd has a story to tell from almost everywhere.

'She shares this account of her life from her formative years in India, Germany, Ireland, Egypt, Cyprus and Britain through to her years at The University of Western Australia, where she was the first woman to become president of the student guild, beating, among others, Kim Beazley. She then explores her life as a high-flying official firmly ensconced in the ever-changing diplomatic landscape of the 80’s and 90’s.

'From politics to travel to art, world leaders and everything in between, Sue’s remarkable stories make this a must read.' (Publication summary)

'An ancient ocean roars under the red dirt. Hush. Be still for just a moment. Hear its thundering waves crashing on unseen shores.

'Spanning four generations, with a focus on the 1960s and 70s, an era of rapid social change and burgeoning Aboriginal rights, Where the Fruit Falls is a re-imagining of the epic Australian novel.

'Brigid Devlin, a young Aboriginal woman, and her twin daughters navigate a troubled nation of First Peoples, settlers and refugees – all determined to shape a future on stolen land. Leaving the sanctuary of her family’s apple orchard, Brigid sets off with no destination and a willy wagtail for company. As she moves through an everchanging landscape, Brigid unravels family secrets to recover what she’d lost – by facing the past, she finally accepts herself. Her twin daughters continue her journey with their own search for self-acceptance, truth and justice.' (Publication summary)

'‘The Weave is the second book collaboration between Thurston Moore and John Kinsella — dubbed a work in progress by the two poets, the book guides readers through a world in decay, crafting an invigo rating language of spontaneity and survival out of the destruction. Moore and Kinsella aren’t just observing — they implicate us all in the harms of global capitalism and environmental disaster, charting a back and forth between the individual and the crowd.’— Rosie Long Decter

'‘These poems start in Dolphy’s key + end with a quarryman’s dream. In between secrets are stored. See how many you can find.’— Clark Coolidge'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'The dancer in your hands <> is a superb and compellingly sustained poetic work. It mobilises striking innovations in notation, such as punctuation marks making visible the energetic, choreographic, and imaginative aspects of dance. As a book The dancer in your hands <> enacts the virtual, temporalized tremor, becoming a seismograph of latent bodily event. Refusing gendered binaries Pollitt engages in an erotics of the interstices, celebrating both the elongation of the moment and the exhilaration of the fugitive, or what the dancer-poet calls the radical impermanence of dance.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'Scratchland is poetry with a performative tilt. A topography of voices, of casual and perhaps not so casual encounters. A car park attendant, a neglected child, a crow with a mordant sense of humour...a possible crime. Creatures and plants scratching an existence (and occasionally flourishing) in the urban margins. People struggling to make their lives into stories and make those stories known to others.

'A collection in two parts, Scratchland is about wild frontiers the wild frontiers of our cities (Scenarios & solos from a mixed landscape) and the wild frontiers of our TV viewing (True crimers).'   (Publication summary)

'Josephine Clarke’s poems shimmer with everyday grace: moments in ordinary lives, celebrated with compassion and photographic vividness. From ancestral Italy, via the Karri forests, farms and small towns of southern WA to contemporary Perth, they record a transplanting of culture and acknowledge the importance of remembering who we are and where we’ve grown from. Rich with delights and griefs of several generations, as well as sometimes wry, sometimes exquisite observations of landscapes, birds, suburban gardening … social change and Instagram … this is a collection to treasure: a family history in indelible ink that is a joy to read, intensely moving and universally recognizable.' - Jean Kent (Publication summary)

(Publication summary)

'In the midst of change, this book comes with its own bewilderment, yielding, and accounting. Where does 'I' begin or where does 'I' become something else, as poet and poem constantly reshape each other? Jones speaks the world as she sees it, with a poetry negotiating the ancient mythic and the now, where boundaries are disordered and rearranged in a geography of emotions. It also pays homage to major influences in various, sometimes playful ways. This book is digressive, idiosyncratic, queer and challenging. At the same time it is rhythmic, lyrical, and recuperative.' (Publication summary) 

I am calling her Amber because amber is my favourite stone. In truth, it is not a stone at all. Technically, it is fossilised tree resin that has withstood all kinds of weather and woe, the likes of which would normally cause sap to disintegrate. Amber resists decay.

'I am calling her Amber to give her something precious. To remind her of what the world has to offer. She knew this once, more keenly than most. But she has forgotten. I am hoping to remind her that the world’s beauty isn’t gone. That beauty exists inside things, sometimes trapped, often obscured.

'When Amber returns to her home in the Australian desert one year after her brother’s death, her hope is to move on from her grief, to start again. Invited to do some work in a remote Aboriginal community, she relishes the opportunity to return to country she loves so deeply. She hadn’t realised her friend Andrew had a reason to ask her to come back.

'She begins a three-day road trip on unsealed roads that link a constellation of Aboriginal communities. From the outset, it is as if she has been picked up willy willy on a windless day, and must be carried to the end of it —until the wind decides to drop. During this adventure, her composure is undone by a series of encounters, observations, the country itself, and she learns that grief takes its own time.

'Told like memoir, spun like myth, this is a philosophical tale about coming to terms with the death of a loved one. About our way of dealing with death, and the offerings of another culture. It is about home, and how this is found in people as much as place.' (Publication summary)

'Darkfall is a potent and unforgettable work of compelling writing about an adolescence lived in an Australian country town in Victoria in the 1970s: desolate, dusty and bleak. Indigo Perry’s narrative is a journey of grief, arranged around a score of music from alternative and post-punk sources, music unavailable outside cities in an age before the internet. This music, she contends, provides an imagined soundtrack, a ballast, for her isolation.

'Darkfall identifies a legacy of extreme toxic masculinity, containing little in the way of justice, and gendered violence. The author’s deep retrospective unstitching of her reality is presented to us with great poetic strength, uncovering the power that resilience can unleash on an adult body. It is an act of recovery.' (Publication summary) 

''Late afternoon. An isolated lagoon, water glassy, teeming with birdlife-black swans, ducks, a pelican. Sunset begins to tint the sky. I point the camera at the water to catch the clouds reflected there just as a solitary duck swims into view. Everything in the photograph is familiar yet the effect is entirely strange. The duck is swimming across the sky...'

'The reflections in Sky Swimming can be read as meditations on the enigmas of love, family, ageing, memory, home and belonging. At its heart is a mudbrick house built by two women on an ancient lava flow in the Warrumbungle Mountains, circling back to a childhood filled with music in Melbourne and an early career in the theatre. It fans out across the world to a family mystery in The Netherlands of the 1950s and a friendship in Montreal in the 1990s. Reflections on the process of writing feminist biography are included and the women from Martin's biographies thread their way through the narrative alongside the people who have helped shape her life, often in unexpected directions.' (Publication summary)