Poetry

These two speculative works offer visions of the future in which the earth is devastated. Each involves humans living disrupted, transformed lives – defying or redefining extinction, carrying on, muddling through.

Skrzynecki writes as a storyteller who recalls nature, family, and friends, as well as time and place, with narratological detail.

By beginning Case Notes with poems about dogs, David Stavanger establishes from the beginning that his book is not purely the interrogation of the archival self, of self-research, that we might imagine from its title.

Revenants creates a liminal zone of perception in Adam Aitken’s oeuvre.

In the wake of the loss of Australian poet Jordie Albiston on the last day of February of this year, I have been reflecting on the profound influence her work had on my reading, writing and appreciation of poetry since I first read excerpts of her work in an undergraduate course reader.

Wild Curious Air finds its material in what has come before, digs into the turbulence and profusion of the present, and propagates the demand that we attend to the reality and urgency of this moment.

How can poetics work to recover meaningful spaces of ecological acknowledgement and encounter? In Earth Dwellers, Lang demonstrates the complicity of language in severing the Earth from ourselves.

Biographies juxtapose competing views of particular events, moments and aspects of Plath’s life. Red Comet, over a thousand pages, takes in all the other Plath biographies before it. Scholarship is meant to work like this, as is legal precedent. Biography is like a party game where each person adds to a story, repeating and elaborating on what has come before.

When I began
reading how to make a basket
I wanted to find out what I could do
with the text. How would I tend to
the ‘how to’ aspect of its title?

Andrada can share testimony of some of her most painful, personal experiences, but choose exactly which parts of herself to reveal and which to remain hidden. Look, she invites her reader, look at how skillfully I can create all these perfect likenesses of myself. And watch as I destroy them all.