As signalled by his pen name, Youfou Shidai (Age of UFO), Zhang Chunhua sets his poetry adrift into space, away from humanity, with lingering glances at its mathematics of desire and coming sterility, its ‘thinking fish’ and ‘categories of rubbish’.
Kintsugi
The Japanese art of ‘Kintsugi’, the use of gold or other materials to repair and decorate broken pottery, provides the underlying theme of this…
Earshot
This debut collection from Sam Morley comprises poetry that is image-rich, probing and sublime. Committed to observation as a vehicle for discovery, Earshot is a book-length meditation deep in the mystery of the domestic sphere and the natural world. The poems are often profoundly personal while somehow removed, rippling out from Morley’s unique inner perceptions into something universal and large. Pictures and diction progress with a
distinctively strenuous, yet fluent movement – these are poems which deliver more in a few lines than many poems deliver in their entirety.
Ask No Questions
In her memoir Ask No Questions, Eva Collins charts her family’s journey from Poland to Australia during the Cold War. Her restrained tone reflects the threat her parents experienced of the Communist regime and of ubiquitous anti-Semitism. Simply written and deeply moving she captures loss and gain, grief and celebration with great poignancy. With a third of Australians born overseas and half of the population with one migrant parent, Ask No Questions forms a crucial part of our national experience. Its accessible poetry is particularly suited to young adult readers.
feels right
REVIEWS “This collection explores the nexus of political affect, incorporating real life actors… Vate’s in media res conversational style is no longer particularly experimental…Vate…
the attentions
REVIEWS “Green posits a productive anti-poetic that, to continue the EP analogy, would make this chapbook electronica…Some have been composed with online tools, and…
angel wings dumpster fire
‘angel wings dumpster fire’ is a (small) book-length poem that is also a letter to the poet’s dead father.
Thankless
REVIEWS “Grace Heyer was a joint winner of the 2018 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award… more of a cosmopolitan, than metropolitan poet, with her…
A Coach Heading Towards the Provinces
Born in dire poverty but writing poetry all his life, even when he ran a successful business, Xifeng Yedu is one of the Chinese oral poets who doesn’t belong but must write his kind of oral poetry that mixes politics with sex and transcends them, with a fine sense of the Chinese language, in a post-China and Covid-19 environ, in which he is trying to eke out a poetic existence in what is already a Chinese Melbourne.
Off Limits
Off Limits features toads and torched pubs, and the hidden lives of foxes. The title poem suggests spaces that are barred, out of bounds. By extension, the collection probes underground mindscapes and the buried lives of others. Lifts manhole covers, shines a spotlight on the ways the human heart enacts rebellion. ‘Tunnel rats’ skateboarding in Sydney’s drains. Cavers making erotic forays into the forbidden White Bay Power Station. Developers eying off iconic buildings. These poems capture the desperation of commuters trapped on motorways, of long-distance lovers navigating desire between hot chilli sauce and Arizona landscapes. This is the territory of space travel and robots, the wonders of biomimicry and the transcending of our limitations to learn from animals. Wryly ironic about humanity’s dream of reinventing itself on other planets, the poet resists the trashing of the one we inhabit. This is poetry of passionate engagement, clear-eyed and firmly earthed.
