Literature Books

In his first days as Prime Minister, John Curtin presented himself to the press as a self-styled intellectual who loved sport and relaxing, when he could, with a book, beach walk, game of cards or fossick in the garden. He also revealed that he enjoyed...

'This substantial collection holds the reader with its unique voice and finely crafted language. In each section, the poems build on and inform each other, while their major themes thread throughout with compassion and wry humour. Whether as flaneur or...

'Anh and Lucien is a compelling celebration of male desire and intimacy   and also a gripping clash of cultures and ideologies. Danger and death pervade Tony Page's sensuous and sensitive evocation of a risky love affair in an alluring,...

Scratchland is poetry with a performative tilt. A topography of voices, of casual and perhaps not so casual encounters. A car park attendant, a neglected child, a crow with a mordant sense of humour...a possible crime. Creatures and plants scratching an...

In the midst of change, this book comes with its own bewilderment, yielding, and accounting. Where does 'I' begin or where does 'I' become something else, as poet and poem constantly reshape each other? Jones speaks the world as she sees it, with a...

The infernal topographies of the title are more psychological than geographical, though physical travel and the infusing of the past into the present are also at issue. Driven in part by the anxieties of time and mortality that have always been at the...

* Winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2021: Prize for Poetry*The highly anticipated follow up to the award-winning collection The Special, this electric new body of work by poet David Stavanger is a mix tape of free verse, lyric...

A new volume for our UWAP Poetry series, RedACT is 40 or so remixes of redactions of extant texts. Gibson draws on many poets alongside texts such as legal judgements, films, paintings, art installations and occasional skeins of strange prose...

'These vivid poems meld wild energy with meticulous crafting. They trace the tactile, the remembered and the sensuous, tracking young lives as they unfold under a 'deadpan sky'. With their exquisite music, fresh and startling images, they are variously...

Self i.e. is a book-length study of identity, built upon the poet's professional & personal absorption of humanistic psychology, systemic theory & attachment styles within relationships.'Alice Savona is a distinctive voice in contemporary...

Robbie Coburn grew up in Woodstock, Victoria on his family's farm. The Other Flesh, his second volume, contains many poems whose texture sings of being alone under the stars. Coburn's world shimmers with light as much as it burns with ferocity...

We are delighted to be following the successful publication of Satan Repentant last year with this new volume by Michael Aiken.'Everything is at once specific and imaginary in Michael Aiken's poetry. Its minute particulars serve to make strange the very...

'From the exploration of love myths to the celebration of Mumbai, from an extraordinary portrait poem like Sita to the humorous eroticism of Parvati in Darlinghurst, the poems in Vishvarupa show a breadth of human understanding and unassuming wisdom that...

Lyre is a sonic, sculptural cornucopia of new and startling forms. Stuart Cooke proposes that all kinds of life - animal, plant and otherwise - have their own modes of expression, each of which can each be translated into a different kind of...

Shey Marque's debut full collection is wonderfully responsive to the complexity and sensuality of ocean, bush, animals, art and human relationships. The poems are always wryly intelligent, self-aware and carefully crafted, across an impressive variety of...

'A book of rare, complex beauty. Dearborn's range is huge: from the mysteries and beauties of the molecular world to hard-earnt poems of family trauma, from complex love poems to a brilliant sequence based on the life of Virginia Woolf. Her...

'From long narrative lines to fine-boned, lyrical loops and ties that bind these poems into place, Richard James Allen has taken risks with language that mark this as his most adventurous and significant book to date.' - Anthony Lawrence'Allen's subject...

Listen to this non-prophet, This high priestess of poetry: No more hatred, just love, We are pure love, we are pure love. And this gathering, every gathering Is sacred. Listen.Candy Royalle was a spoken word poet par excellence, presenting her words and...

The final book in the Jam Tree Gully trilogy, Open Door continues Kinsella's investigation into environmental responsibility and the complexity of our connection to the land of rural Australia."One of the most original and poignantly...

Paul Hetherington has become a master of the prose poem form, creating intriguing yet hospitable pieces whose tonal, emotional and imaginative range are a delight. Each piece has been carefully wrought to become sharp and revelatory; his graceful...

A violent epic leaping from the cosmological to the infinitesimal, Satan Repentant is a modern-day drama of revenge, resentment, and remorse, telling a new myth of what would happen if Satan tried to apologise and atone for all his crimes. Through that...

Much of Lisa Bellear's poetry is politics made eloquent. In Aboriginal Country many poems seem to spark with frustrated energy over Australia's political crossed circuits regarding a treaty with our First Nations peoples as promised by Prime Minister...

*Winner of the 2020 Chief Minister's NT Book Award for Best Fiction Book*Leni Shilton offers us a woman's exploration of loss and survival in the unforgiving and beautiful landscape of central Australia. Bertha Strehlow, overshadowed by her...

Phillip Hall writes from the edge: the edge of language; the edge of mental illness; and, from the perspective of a non-Indigenous poet and teacher standing at the edge of Indigenous culture and community carrying generosity and love alongside the...

'Neilsen's intelligent, searching, and relentlessly contemporary poems in Wildlife of Berlin reveal a poet whose chief interest is transforming and challenging the way we see our human position in a world under ecological and ideological threat. At once...

Highly Commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript'This is an alive, refreshing and, quite literally, elemental book of water and skin, muscle and fire. Rachael Mead's poems are immediate and grounded whilst entwined with...

Here are scrummed gangs of criminals and police, with all their lurks, quirks and argots. The underworld and its overlords: how ingenious and energetic, how ardent both sides can be. What brutes they can be too, day after day, as they track and trick...

"David Ads' luminous and honest collection, Afloat in Light, is chiefly a celebration of fatherhood and of paying attention, utilising Simone Weil's notion that 'attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity'. The collection extends to existence...

"Joseph Brodsky, the Russian Nobel laureate, once remarked that memory and art have in common the 'ability to select, a taste for detail.' In the work of Nathanael O'Reilly, memory and art come together to bring us poems that remember what cannot...

Communists like us is simple love story, a little fiction told in a hundred poems, a hundred little places to live large, fragments of a story of love in a time of struggle. But then, when isn't it a time of struggle? And when is a story not about love?...

A Personal History of Vision expands on the concerns of Fischer's acclaimed first collection Paths of Flight and embodies what Judith Beveridge has described as his 'seemingly effortless ability to blend visual detail and imaginative vision.'...

Zwicky is one of the world's finest poets; her sophistications of form and theme remind one of Akhmatova, Szymborska, Adrienne Rich and William Blake. With poise and control, she tracks the personal encounter with the weight of history and the obligation...

From inside her Toorakmansion, Margaret, matriarch, widow of Edmund RiceO'Day of O'Day Funerals, secretly surveys her familyin the garden. Everyone, including Margaret herself, isoblivious to the secrets that...

Surely we are better than this?The seeking of asylum in Australia has beenpoliticised in recent decades. Our national conversation hasvilified people fleeing persecution and desensitised the Australianpolity to human suffering...

Aileen Palmer poet, translator, political activist, adventurer was the daughter of two writers prominent in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Vance and Nettie Palmer were well known as...

"Dan Disney's highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. The'sound-swarms' in this contemporary 'orphic' work riff laterally on receivedpoetic and philosophical ideas and incorporate fascinating shreds of thinkingand saying. Rainer Maria...

"In this expansive and excitingcollection Hetherington moves with power and grace through an impressiverange of form and content. The poems burst with tense anddetailed images shot through with meditations on grief absence and...

"Rhythm and patternfollow with precision the rich tonality of Lucas's visual andaural perceptions delivered with just enough tension to allow aline to run free or a word to drop and hang alone where it dances or stops" Amanda...

It's a still, hot summer in Perth, only heat shimmying off the city's glass buildings, and not much to do but surrender to the cool of Beatty Park pools. The locals are out in full force: teenagers flirting, even the ragtag kids from the refuge.But...

Randolph Stow was one of the great Australian writers of his generation. His novel To the Islands - written in his early twenties after living on a remote Aboriginal mission - won the Miles Franklin Award for 1958. In later life, after...

In September 2013 just before the weatherturned even more intense a group of intrepid writers made their wayto three Australian desert settings to work with groups and individualswishing to write. Both Aboriginal people with a...

Crimson Crop is Peter Rose's fifth poetry collection and his first since 2005. This volume has at its core a series of elegies, several about his late father Bob Rose (a respected Australian Rules footballer and coach), thus continuing the themes of his...

Francis Webb (19251973) grew up in North Sydney with his paternal grandparents, who encouraged his love of music, books and the sea. In 1942, during his final year of secondary school, his writing first appeared in the Bulletin, which led to friendships...

Shakespeare's plays are permeable to the contexts in which they are performed: they take on and speak to local concerns. Ours As We Play It takes a close look at several contemporary Australian productions of three Shakespearean plays; exploring...