AustLit

'Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours shares and celebrates the fascinating life stories of everyday Australians.

'Based on one-on-one interviews with forty-five participants, the fifteen poets involved in this project have shaped poems that provide unique and lasting remembrances of the experiences, memories and reflections of members of our older generations.

'Some poems focus on a significant moment, while others provide a wider life narrative. The poems capture important stories of travel and work, family and milestones, achievements and struggles; they provide humble advice to younger generations, learned through circumstance, curiosity, or necessity.

'The poems are paired with watercolour portraits by artist Sierra McManus.' (Publication summary)

'An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre

'Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind-an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry's key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing.

'A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre.

'Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.' (Publication summary)

'The majority of Japanese poetry currently reaches a limited readership outside of Japan. As a result, many contemporary Japanese poets are searching for ways to have their poems translated into English and published in English-language journals. Achieving satisfactory translation results, however, is considerably more complicated than switching words from one language into another and scholarship on the subject of translating Japanese poetry is often vexed. This scholarship frequently traverses much of the same ground as the debate about Japanese prose translation where, depending on their approach, translators may be labelled ‘literalists’ or ‘libertines’. This paper argues that co-translating Japanese poetry may be as much about sharing ideas and ideologies as about lineation, cadence or word choice. Co-translating Japanese poetry has the power to build cross-cultural understandings and to explore and promote ways of understanding Japanese identity. We argue that while translation is often undertaken by the translators in their country of residence, the experience of genius loci and undertaking co-translation in situ may best accommodate such a cross-cultural synergy.

'This paper draws on our collective experiences in a series of translation workshops at Meiji University. These were organised by Rina Kikuchi, a literary scholar and translator from Japan. Among other Australian poets and scholars, Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton were paired with Japanese poets for co-translation purposes. They co-translated Japanese poetry into English and had their own poems translated into Japanese with the assistance of Kikuchi who acted as the lynchpin for the workshops. The experience was celebrated in a series of poetry readings in Tokyo and Nara. Significantly, although neither Hetherington nor Atherton is fluent in Japanese, they found the process of co-translation to include what one may call an attentive cosmopolitanism, incorporating respect and understanding for different cultural assumptions and poetic ideas.' (Publication abstract) 

'John Kinsella’s three-volume Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 (2016) constitutes a major and shifting set of poetic statements. Partly a discontinuous poetic chronicle of life in Western Australia’s Avon Valley, they are also an investigation of ways in which an activist poetry may inscribe aspects of being, self and experience while protesting against environmental challenges and degradation. As these poems sprawl in many directions and express overlapping preoccupations, and as they emphasise the unsettled and unstable while affirming what has a continuing importance, so they constitute a series of ethical positions connected to living sustainably and responsibly. They also explore the porous nature of a poetic activism that steps out into the quotidian world while simultaneously refashioning the poetic, challenging and even subverting the language of the contemporary lyric and the contemporary pastoral. The Graphology poems prize incompleteness and the fragmentary, open out to reveal absences and imply other texts, value multiple meanings and represent many of the most important strands of Kinsella’s work.' (Publication abstract)

'A series of beautifully controlled fictional voices and an exquisite sense of literary craft contribute to the dark magnificence of Chloe Wilson’s début collection of short stories, Hold Your Fire. This volume explores the strange and sometimes surprising abject horror that characterises the quotidian and the ordinary. The stories both examine and revel in the classically Kristevan abject realities of the body’s expulsions and the disgust that is often characteristic of social marginality. For example, the ‘poo phantom’ writes a ‘message in shit on the walls’; tampons wrapped in toilet paper are described as ‘bodies that needed to be shrouded for burial’; a character feels a ‘quiver down to the bowels, the rush that is equal parts excitement and dread’; another tries ‘to pass a kidney stone’; and two sisters try an ‘Expulsion Cure’, where the doctor asks how much they expel: ‘And how often? And what is the colour? The texture? … When you eat something – poppy seeds, say, or the skin on a plum – how long does it take to reappear?’' (Introduction)

'Cri Fi, Sci Fi, Noir, Rom Com, Lit Fic, Western, Horror, Gothic, Fantasy, Fairytale… In this latest anthology of microlit, writers were invited to play with genre.  Here you will find some of the well-worn tropes from literature and film reshaped and manipulated – all in less than half a page. The results are sometimes political, sometimes philosophical; but always playful, witty and stunningly written.

'Edited by Cassandra Atherton, and with a Foreword by Jodi McAlister, the anthology includes pieces by commissioned well-known writers including the award-winning joanne burns, as well as new voices unearthed through the national Microlit Award named in her honour.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'When Charity finds letters, journals and sketches in the roof of her great-aunt’s house, she uncovers a rich family history that she must piece together from fragments. Great-aunt Birdie’s letters to her lover are a compelling and revealing account of life for many women in the 1930s. Her experiences as an artist in the first decades of the century, and her earlier relationship with a young man who goes to war, also provide powerful insights into a woman who, as Charity begins to suspect, wanted more than her era would allow.'

Source: Publishr's blurb.

'Until recently, Australian prose poetry hasn’t attracted much attention – we’re not sure why. Having written prose poetry for years, we’re both fascinated by the form, which can be loosely defined as poems written in paragraphs and sentences rather than in stanzas and lines.' (Introduction)