Literature Books

'The poems in Sometimes's collection deftly transcend both spatial scales and time scales. From one line to another we careen across the universe. We fast-forward from the first picosecond of stuff forming in the universe to a Christmas card,...

'Alex Creece's Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a reckless, glorious, grotty revolution. It's an insubordinate 'kissyface of cobwebs' that sticks it to capitalism, heteronormativity and the patriarchy.Quotably horny and delightfully vulgar, Potty...

For Varatharajan, all communication is an art defined by authenticity rather than decadence. These poems do not drink and dial, hey do not hit 'send' too soon. In this manner they are a balm to current hyperactive expectations of social responsiveness...

Gibson's fragmentary style favours standalone single lines or short sentences to exemplify episodic thinking and the discontinuities of broken narrative. He engages cultures in scraps and shards in this savvy and unique collection.Where does it take...

Omar Sakr's poetry consists of rich and convincing detail charged with presence and particularity; his poetic voice is so firmly planted and immersed in the world around him that the urgency of his images and rhythms is completely convincing. His complex...

'Hemensley reads his poetry in a warm accent of old Hampshire and more recent Dorset overlaid with Melbourne, unconsciously abstracting his past. This book is not a harvest of words but a mapping of fields, and paths, from impressions distilled through...

They are not just words whistling on the wind. They come laden with other gifts. With a whole place: Melbourne. It makes you wonder what elements must thus congeal to sustain the songs, the poems, across all these pages without once faltering, without...

Eh? You want bodies, blood, sex, gore, damning gods, raw uppercuts?Why, yes. Pooja Mittal Biswas welcomes you into the ring of identity and the hunt for an honest and rapier self.Glove up.'Confessional poetry can deteriorate into fetishism, in Biswas's...

A collection, written in English and Scots, that explores immigration, home and place.'When I first left my home, the gnawing ache for all I'd left behind family, friends, my land, my whole life made me numb and thrawn. Weeping and sobbing bubblin an...

**Shortlisted, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2023, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry**In this new collection by a seasoned master, Kim Cheng Boey moves between Singapore and Australia, youth and middle age places and times rendered in vivid,...

Dan Hogan's Secret Third Thing is a hyper-real comment on this hyper-real moment: it is suffused with internet culture and reections on the lives we live, now, largely online. What characterises Hogan's poetry is the way that, each time we come close to...

'The only Sundays I looked forward to were spent with my beloved Australian nanna Kathleen Mary McCarthy. I would sit with Nanna McC - listening to her stories unwind - and watch her pickle onions and brew ginger beer for Sister Kate's fte. She...

Says O'Keefe about her collection: 'Held under an incorrect adverb, the slowness of this book is expressed as intransigent buffering and refusal of optimisation. The book is shaped by a stubborn commitment to inclusive imprecision which seeks...

The labour never finishes. Astrid Lorange speaks of building a poetics - intensive and intentional - as a way of perceiving the world of relations in their shadow, every poem here requests an attentiveness to the relations of our lives, to the entwining...

Philosophical questions of reality and duality underpin many of the poems in Zenobia Frost's After the Demolition, leading to a sense of rebuilding and remembrance in the aftermath of abodes. Frost's poetic is a kind of antipodean neo-Gothic,...

Australians hear the call of Country, but without knowledge of the history and the lives of its animals and plants, that call is confused and loses itself in opal fields and vainglorious stockman's museums. Follow Crisp: not for her the umbrella on the...

*Shortlisted for the SPN Book of the Year Award 2020*Nganajungu Yagu is dedicated to Papertalk Green's mother, and is built around selected correspondence between Yagu and Daughter. It gently reminds us of the sacrifices made by our matriarchs over time...

In Walk Back Over, Wiradjuri woman - read: poet, academic, historian, teacher - Jeanine Leane takes off our wallpaper to reveal the personal and political layers of a nuanced history. With Leane, we walk back over history pages, walk back over the night...

In A J Carruthers's new poetry collection, collisions between disparate languages, histories and ideas - each with their own distinct voices - are staged through a visually arresting and innovative approach to form. Drawing on media such as musical...

These are poems that reflect many aspects of the human condition and the individual, from poems about love and death, the family, science, the natural world and historical figures such as Ned Kelly and Charles Darwin. Her sequence on Ned Kelly...

Ages 4 to 8 years. Yelling and shouting, the children chased each other in and out of the water...They didn't realise that they were sharing the water with a tired old Wunambi. Find out what happens when his rest is disturbed. Wunambi the water snake...

'I was confined, locked into my library, tracing my heartbeats from way, way back.'In Telltale, Carmel Bird seizes on an enforced isolation to re-read a rich dispensary of books from her past. A rule she sets herself is that she can consult only...

A fearless and honest exploration of queer First Nations identity, and a vibrant celebration of imperfection and personal growth, if this is the end is a stunning exploration of what it means to work through childhood trauma and love yourself in the...

'in ember and ash / the heart of the Noongar Nation beats buried...'Refugia is an unparalleled work of vision and political fury from Noongar and Yawuru poet and scholar Elfie Shiosaki. Inspired by the beeliar (Swan River) and the NASA James Webb Space...

Winner 2015 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship a partnership between the State Library ofQueensland's black&write! Indigenous Writing and Editing Project and Magabala BooksFrom a remarkable new voice in Indigenous writing comes...

I travel Country, like my Old People done. I see the Country, like my Old People done I burn Country, like my Old People done. I sing Country, like my Old People done -Jacob Morris,Ban Maganindadjyang (My Old People Done)Guwayu, For All Timesis a...

In this beautifully crafted, evocative and poignant anthology of prose and fiction, a diverse group of young black writers are encouraged to find strength in their voices and what is important to them. maar bidi is a journey into what it is to be young,...

WINNER - 2019 Queensland Literary Awards (Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection WINNER - 2019 Mascara Avant-Garde Literary Award SHORTLISTED 2019 Prime Minister's Literary Awards (Poetry) SHORTLISTED 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary...

You are indeed / a truly deadly solid / moorditj yorgah An' um / jerrepjing something wicked / for you But um / just a wintjarren Nyoongar manCartwarra or what? Selected poems and stories is a compendium of Alf's works that span several literary...

JONO: 'Sometimes it feels like...' [Pause]. 'I don't fit in at home! I'm tryin' to juggle two worlds here and if you don't tell me things, it gets easier and easier to keep my life at camp separate to my life at home.'FIFO Fit In or F**k Off! explores...

More Than These Bones is an epic and intercontinental poetry work detailing the author's journey through heartbreak and self-discovery. The book is rooted in place. Pieces land in multiple settings the bar, the beach, the bush and sometimes, the bedroom,...

**Winner, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2024, Book of the Year****Winner, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2024, Indigenous Writer's Prize**She Is the Earth is the luminous new verse novel from celebrated poet Ali Cobby Eckermann...

A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative, to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's...

Song in the Grass is Kate Fagan's most personal collection to date. Each of its five sequences moves out in a widening circle from where the poet is standing in life. The collection is an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in...

Judith Beveridge's much-anticipated new collection of poems, the first since her prize-winning new and selected, Sun Music, in 2018.The poems in Tintinnabulum focus on animals, people, and places, though you could say that the real subject matter is the...

Naag Mountain is a journey across oceans, from the Asian subcontinent to the South Seas, a journey about human trafficking on sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia, which brings to life the histories and events, the stories and myths of a displaced and...

An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past -...

Powerful debut which interrogates the nature of love in its various formsFrom poems of desire and sexual longing to poems of love in the face of death, The Cyprian explores the joy and heartbreak love weaves into our lives. The collection confronts some...

The last work by Antigone Kefala, renowned for both her poetry and her prose, one of the first writers to open Australian literature to a diversity of voices, and of the most distinctive and powerful of those voices.Late Journals completes a trilogy of...

New collection, ten years in the making, by one of Australia's richest lyrical poets.Acanthus offers a collection of poems that dwell in the landscapes of the northern and southern hemispheres, evoking myth and fantasy and romance, as they move between...

The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to...

Jane Gibian's poetry is remarkable for its clarity of perception and its sensitivity to the details and rhythms of life - whether in nature or in social routines. The poetry's engagement is first and foremost with the natural environment, and with the...

Sydney Spleen takes Charles Baudelaire's concept of spleen as melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything and combines it with a contemporary sense of irony so as to articulate the causes of our doom and gloom: corporate...

Song Lin is one of China's most innovative poets. When the Tiananmen protest exploded in Beijing in June 1989, Song led student demonstrations in Shanghai and was imprisoned for almost a year. He left China soon afterwards. This selection of poems, made...

"His is either a well-oiled universe or a chaos huddled together...he's a mannish character, unanimal, counterfeit, scurrilous."Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous is a work of wild erudition and rococo elaboration, a collection...

The crags do not notice if I have come from stone or am becoming stone or am merely part of the weather.The Anthropocene what can poetry do in this epoch in the Earth's history defined by human impact? With its immersion in powerful wilderness...

When J.S. Harry died in 2015 she was acknowledged as one of the great female poets of her generation, alongside Fay Zwicky, Antigone Kefala, Jennifer Maiden and Judith Rodriguez.This commemorative volume gathers poems from all her collections, as well as...