AustLit

'Do not be afraid to think.

'Test form, renew form, or defy it.

'Know there is a new permission to speak, and for more voices.

'Not to censure, censor our inheritances—in which there is still the cherishable, the followable—but to question, yes, that. To make that effort, with caring, love, and as needed, fierceness.

'To write, read the self, which can also be multiple, as are our inheritances, and also within if wished for, community.

'When I first devised the idea of this New Series two years ago, it was intended to be celebratory, motivated by the current flourishing which is occurring in poetry and poetry publication in Australia. In it, another poet/critic or poetry community associate is ‘allied’ with a new or recent Australian poetry collection, be that an individual volume, or an anthology, or another platform. Some books go back a little (there is one from 2017), but most are of the past 12-24 months; the impetus was to make tribute to a splendid range of contemporary Australian poetry publishing.' (Jacinta Le Plastrier, Introduction)

'This new anthology of Australian and New Zealand poetry is remarkable for its exuberance, its vitality, and the notably youthful vibrancy of its free verse as well as its innovative prose poetry.  Including a wide range of voices from such well-known poets as John Kinsella, Pam Brown, and John Tranter to relative new-comers like Chris Tse and essa may ranapiri, The Language in my Tongue is full of surprises and special pleasures.

—Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English
 at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor
 of English Emerita at the University of Southern California

'Here are vernaculars. Here are modern-day classics. Here is a “mind in an unclear world,” “a space perfection will never survive.”  Here is invention permitted to travel the world, in dense prose poems and in chatty ones, in capable free verse and ghazals, “emissaries” and “a russet lock in an envelope.” Here Echnida meets the Spider, “making things transparent,” and here [is] bodily frailty and erotic love. Here, readers, are some highlights of the Antipodes, two—no, far more than two—poetic traditions, made available for you. Investigate. Drink deep.

—Stephanie Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University'  (Publication summary)