AustLit

'As I write this, fires are burning out of control on Kangaroo Island and all along the east coast of Australia. Lives, homes, half a billion animals: gone. As I write this, I am awaiting a blood sunset, the kind that filters the land through a lens of pink, helping everything to complement the colour of my acrylic nails. As I write this, citizens of the USA (and the world) are holding their collective breath awaiting retaliation from the Iranian army in response to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. As I write this, I can tell the three avocados in the fruit bowl beside me will all ripen tomorrow morning. As I write this, I am wondering if I can afford to renew my gym membership and what will happen to my body if I don’t.

'As I write this, I question the necessity of a poem – written on and with and for atoms, spoken through waves – combustible, ephemeral, biodegradable. Each poem in this book exists in two forms, both inhabiting a unique state of decay or decomposition (perhaps re-composition?). How you choose to engage is entirely up to you. Read this book back to front, front to back, upside down, right way round. Start at the beginning, in the middle; breathe it in one word at a time. Use it as a doorstop, as Tinder, as rolling paper – but read it first if only to revel in its potential/futility.

'–Em König'

(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.

'Rallying was written alongside Quinn Eades’s first book, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and before he began transitioning from female to male. A collection very much concerned with the body, and the ways in which we create and write under, around, without, and with children, this collection will resonate deeply with anyone who has tried to make creative work from underneath the weight of love. This is a collection of poems that are more than poems. They were written with children, under babies, around grief, amongst crumbs, on trains, with hope: with love. This is a book made of steel and honey, muscle and sun, with tongues. Open its pages and you will find more than poetry. You will find moments in time strung across by text, a poetics of the space between bodies, the way that language makes us separate and simultaneously whole.' (Publication summary)

'False Nostalgia is rare among poetry collections, a work which is both lyrical and philosophical. It explores the way memory works, and the role memory plays in our sense of identity, and what we take to be the significant moments in our lives – the relationship between what we remember and the stories we tell about ourselves. Through stand-alone poems, exploratory poetic sequences, and essays which read like extended prose poems, Rolfe considers the complex connections between experience and recollection, the drive to document the moment, the fear of forgetting, the power of nostalgia, and the creative unreliability of memory itself. He approaches his subjects from oblique angles, evoking feelings of connection and disconnection, the experience of never quite grasping your own understanding of things. The poems place the reader in half-remembered places – on beaches walked during holidays, in festival gatherings and forests, film screenings and auction houses – asking not only what it means to look back fondly on a second-rate experience, but what it means to look forward to looking back on a moment while you’re still living through it.' (Source: Publisher's website)