AustLit

'After spending my teenage years with only Dorothy Porter for Australian poetry company, I discovered HEAT magazine in the orderly periodical shelves of the University of Queensland’s Social Sciences and Humanities Library. I was supposed to be learning how to write essays for EN152, instead I was learning how Australians wrote poetry. Until then I had thought it was only Brits, Yanks and James Gleeson who wrote poetry, but it turned out people from this country, only a decade or so older than myself, were writing poems about things I recognised in language that was familiar. Chief among the poets who dazzled me on those distracted days was Cassie Lewis, a precociously talented young Melbournian riding high at the turn of the millennium. As well as publishing regularly in key magazines, her work was collected in the era’s two important anthologies of Australian poetry: Michael Brennan and Peter Minter’s Calyx and Ron Pretty’s New Music. Still only in her mid-twenties, Lewis was the fourth youngest poet in Pretty’s book and perhaps (not all birthdates are listed) the youngest in Brennan’s and Minter’s. She was one of only a dozen poets who appeared in both.' (Introduction)