AustLit

'In Abbas El-Zein’s new memoir, conflicts abound – either tragic or amusing, sometimes both – between teachers and students, left- and right-wing factions, civilians and militiamen and, not least, French and Arabic, two languages vying for primacy in the post-colonial worlds of Beirut and the Levant, with English coming fast from behind. By the time he graduated from high school, El-Zein had nearly drowned in the Mediterranean, survived the breakout of civil war and lived through the violent death of two close family members. He witnessed Syrian and Israeli soldiers invade his country and, from his bedroom balcony, saw the mushroom cloud of the explosion that killed hundreds of American and French marines. But while war and tragedy struck every now and then, everyday life continued unabated, rich with humour, serendipity and love of many kinds. Bullet, Paper, Rock is a story of survival, and a meditation on desire and loss, language and violence. It is at once a requiem for a Levantine past gone sour – from the innocent 1970s, through September 11 and its aftermath, to the cataclysms of the Arab Spring and the Israel-Palestine conflict – and a tribute to women of his family – “weavers whose fabric of choice is hope, they were hard at work, at night as in daytime, carving out viable lives, ones in which they loved and were loved aplenty”.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A darkly humorous and groundbreaking memoir from a new voice in queer literature

'In Detachable Penis- A Queer Legal Saga, Elkin relates his bumpy journey from lesbian to transgender lawyer in the aftermath of the 2017 marriage equality postal survey.

'As the inaugural lawyer of Victoria's queer law service, Elkin is quickly immersed in thorny debates around trans inclusion in sport, children's access to puberty blockers, birth certificate law reform and the Christian right's demand for enhanced religious freedoms. Set against the backdrop of a growing moral panic about the 'trans agenda', Elkin reflects on the double-edged sword of visibility post the 'transgender tipping point'.

'Elkin offers an honest, unflinching account of chest surgery, phalloplasty, the emotional impact of cross-sex hormones and the perils of airport body scanners. Undogmatic and refreshingly open-minded, Elkin explores his ambivalence about aspects of his own transition, masculinity and fears of lesbian erasure as he encounters a new world of gender-affirming psychologists, surgeons and speech pathologists.

'Through an examination of Elkin's legal casework and law reform efforts, Detachable Penis offers a kaleidoscopic view of LGBTIQA+ communities living on the margins. This politically sharp narrative offers a nuanced account of the lateral violence, poor mental health and activist burn out that besets the contemporary LGBTIQA+ rights movement.

'Part love letter and part cautionary tale, Detachable Penis offers a darkly humorous glimpse into Elkin's unique life in the law that will undoubtedly spark many prickly conversations.' (Publication summary)

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'The first adaption of a complete Shakespeare play entirely in one Australian Aboriginal language, this books track the passionate project of language recovery and restoration into a highly successful mainstage production.

'The play Hecate is a landmark work in both theatre and language restoration. The Noongar language of the southwest of Western Australia is a critically endangered language impacted by settler-colonialism and suppressed until the 1970s. This book contains the complete play, a glossary, and chapters outlining the process of creating and then producing a play onto a professional stage with a Noongar cast working as both language learners and performers, where song became their catalyst to success.

'Premiering to critical acclaim in Perth Festival 2020, Hecate is a ground-breaking and audacious adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth in the Noongar language and from a Noongar perspective. The project in its early stages involved the development and presentation of Sonnets in Noongar, a selection of sonnets as part of the World Shakespeare Festival at the Globe Theatre in 2012 in London. The original cast remain poised to take Hecate to the UK and complete the circle.

'This dazzling project is brought to life in this short book designed to inspire language recovery and restoration in Australia, in a period when serious attention is being paid to many endangered languages. It demonstrates the power of performance to build community strength.' (Publication summary)

The final collection from the award-winning 'poet of the Hawkesbury River'

In the old days I used to think art

That was purely imagined could fly higher

Than anything real. Now I feel a small fluttering

Bird in my own pulse, a connection to the sky.

--from 'The Kingfisher's Soul'

'In the last year of his life, with the help of friend and poet Devin Johnston, Robert Adamson put together a selection of his writings on the natural world. Birds and Fish defines the presences in his life on the Hawkesbury River and includes excerpts from his autobiography, Inside Out, as well as essays written over the years for Fishing World; some prose poems; and journal excerpts related to his bowerbird Spinoza. Adamson's prose is vivid, precise, and draws on his life on the river and his poetic sensibility. The final book will include selected black and white photographs by Adamson's partner Juno Gemes. (Publication summary)

'I saved the pieces of you

when you fell apart

'Robert Adamson wrote that Robbie Coburn's poems "come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence". Largely set within stark farmland and surreal, nightmarish dreams, Coburn's new collection of poems, Ghost Poetry, is haunted by depression, trauma, addiction, memory, regret, and the spectre of mutilation and violence inflicted on the human body, accompanied by the desire to leave.

'But through this, there is always the process of the poet writing; an act that both dissects and preserves experience and suffering. This act ultimately creates, as Leonard Cohen wrote, an engine of survival.

'Always vulnerable, often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader' (Publication summary)

'In Fat Chance, poet and publisher Kent MacCarter investigates variations on how non-fiction can be reported, taking an uncanny look into sole survivors of major airline crashes, a memoir approach at the surgical complication known as gossypiboma – where an instrument is left behind in a body cavity after surgery – a recount of marketing tactics for children's toys and more.

'Columns of justified prose lure you into the familiar channels of reporting facts; you could be mistaken for believing there is no poet or poetry here at all. Yet, the primary purpose of Fat Chance is not the transmission of information, and it thrives on contradiction. Contrary to the title's colloquial meaning, it offers you ample possibility. Here, the journalistic and the poetic collide to liberate language from truth so you can wander in the wide, bountiful space between.

'Emotion is denuded from the stories, forcing you to fill the void with your own suppositions and terrors ... rubbernecking at yourself on why you are uncomfortably allured. With its irony and absurdity dialled up to the sublime, you will be confronted by this feel-bad book of the year.' (Publication summary)

'‘This is how I became interested in things. In their strange pull and power; in the ways they hold on to us and we to them.’

'After her father dies of cancer, Gemma Nisbet is inundated with keepsakes connected to his life by family and friends. As she becomes attuned to the ways certain items can evoke specific memories or moments, she begins to ask questions about the relationships between objects and people. Why is it so difficult to discard some artefacts and not others? Does the power exerted by precious things influence the ways we remember the past and perceive the future?

'As Nisbet considers her father’s life and begins to connect his experiences of mental illness with her own, she wonders whether hanging on to ‘stuff’ is ultimately a source of comfort or concern.

'Intimate and wide-ranging, The Things We Live With is a collection of essays about how we learn to live with the ‘things’ handed down in families which we carry throughout our lives: not only material objects, but also grief, memory, anxiety and depression. It’s about notions of home and restlessness, inheritance and belonging – and, above all, the ways we tell our stories to ourselves and other people.'

Source: Abstract.

'Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote? Abandon Every Hope is a lament, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age? Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profit-driven death. In her compelling and poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead; the smell of an egg factory; of multispecies PTSD; of planetary harm and self-harm: of the horror we make on earth. Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Meditations on parenthood, memory, death, the natural world, the fluctuations of pop culture, and the suburban grind with aplomb in a keen observational style

'Sam Morley's second collection comprises poetry that is image-rich, fusing the sublime with the common. Always committed to observation as a channel into discovery, You Do You merges meditations on parenthood, memory, death, the natural world and the fluctuations of pop culture and the suburban grind. The primary setting is the home, be it as a father or child or as a person perplexed by the vicissitudes of humanity. These poems start from the personal while remaining detached, and often undulate from the private world into something universal and large.' (Publication summary) 

(Publication summary)

'A violent and senseless crime committed against an innocent citizen, and a father's desire 25 years later to speak directly to others who have lost a child or experienced similar grief to help in the necessary recovery back into their lives.

'Ciara Glennon vanished into the night in Perth, Western Australia, leaving a family and a city in deep shock. When her body was found, nineteen days after her disappearance, even those with long memories could not remember a time when the community was as overwhelmed with sadness and anguish. A violent and senseless crime committed against an innocent citizen, the details and repercussions of Ciara's disappearance were unsettling.

'Ciara was murdered by the person the media labelled The Claremont Serial Killer. The search to find him spanned twenty-five years. Ciara's father, Denis, was a driving force in insisting that the killer be found and justice be delivered for his daughter.

'Such grief, in its woundedness and suffering, can deliver startling and shocking impacts on body, mind, heart and spirit. This is the story of Denis's journey and the pathways he found to arrive at a sense of peace and contentment after the loss of his daughter.

'Pastures of Healing is a raw, intimate, and uplifting story.' (Publication summary)

'Romance scams, pyramid schemes, bogus debts and fake news, the world is awash with confidence tricksters and swindlers. But what happens if the fraudster is your lover?

'It has been said that trust is a risk masquerading as a promise and, as Hemingway suggested, 'The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them'. Once we have fallen under the spell of malevolent hucksters, their power is real, as is the loss of self and hope when the spell breaks.

'A hybrid memoir and a personal detective story, Trust is an exploration of what it means to trust, why we trust, and what happens when trust is betrayed. With a particular view to fraud and corruption within the hallowed walls of sandstone universities, Ryckmans brings to light the oft subtle, brutal nature of control that fraudsters have over their victims, and shows the deep impacts their actions have on others personally and professionally. The cover up – sometimes said to be worse than the crime – has insidious effects.

'Trust is a fractured fable. It is darkly funny, wistful, and spare in tone and approach' (Publication summary)

'Interviewing more than 30 Australia-based authors and thinkers while examining his own journey towards being openly non-monogamous, Poly author Paul Dalgarno pulls together social history and illuminating first-hand accounts of what it means to have 'unconventional' relationships – with others and even with ourselves – in 21st-century Australia.

'Do authors such as Christos Tsiolkas, Dennis Altman and Andrea Goldsmith think we're more tolerant than we once were? Are writers such as Lee Kofman, Rochelle Siemienowicz and Jinghua Qian optimistic about the future? Do terms such as LGBTQIA+ help or hinder meaningful progress? How does transitioning now compare to transitioning in the 1990s? How does 'queerness' affect notions of parenthood? Do therapists and psychologists still operate from a straight-white-male perspective and how can new practitioners such as popular psychologist and author Chris Cheers change that?

'Entertaining, insightful, funny and thought-provoking, Prudish Nation adjusts the country's bedside lamp to show us a little more clearly who and what we really are.' (Publication summary)

'Children of Tomorrow is an episodic saga, a sweeping history of family and friendship, spanning multiple generations and geographies across the twenty-first century. This web of characters struggle, both individually and collectively, through a time of unprecedented, escalating change. Beginning in 2016, Arne Bakke witnesses the historic devastation of that summer’s bushfires across the ancient wilderness of Tasmania. Elsewhere, Londoner Evie Weatherall witnesses extreme climate events in her travels. They each see a dangerous future forming. When their paths collide in Melbourne, Australia, where they are both enrolled in a PhD, they and their group of close friends are set on course to witness and struggle together against the coming century, an age of great individual and planetary loss.

'Children of Tomorrow depicts an all-too-real future history, rushing on at an unstoppable speed and fracturing the lives of its many characters, the effects of which ripple throughout subsequent generations and the earth they inherit.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

(Publication summary)

(Publication summary)

'The long-awaited second collection from the winner of the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.

'In his stunning collection of new poetry, Stuart Barnes reimagines the poetic form and fearlessly explores topics of illness, death, rape, remembrance, ecology and love.

'Like To The Lark is Stuart Barnes's accumulation of lifetime fascinations with music and sound, form and transformation. Beginning with an apparition of a doomed world brooding over itself and ending with a kvelling globe, this collection plunges into seas, scoots across countries and hurtles towards space.' (Publication summary)

'To fall is to be human. We fall in love, fall asleep, and fall from grace. And in this epoch that we have called the Anthropocene, we are witnessing nothing less than the fall of nature.

'This extraordinary collection, the fifth by the prize-winning poet David McCooey, covers the full tragicomic spectrum of falling: from pratfalls to tragic demises, from accident-prone parents to ruinous celebrities.

'Within its unifying thematic focus, The Book of Falling is tonally and formally diverse, attending with great artistry to the calamities and absurdities of history and the contemporary world. The collection comprises of satires and elegies, inventive poetic autofictions and biofictions, and innovative photopoems, employing found photos and photographs by the author. This is a collection that welcomes its readers, even as it plunges them into new ways of understanding the beautiful, fallen worlds that we inhabit.' (Publication summary)

'A collection of new work by award-winning poet Ann Shenfield. Delving into family trauma in a post-Holocaust context and informed by psychoanalysis, these poems explore identity and the frailty of the human and physical world.A Treatment presents a poetic reflection of family trauma in a post-holocaust context, which is grounded in these times. The poems articulate the past as it intersects with the present, as well as the way the present writes over what has been before, both in human and ecological terms. The writing is informed by psychoanalysis, and the aim of the work is to elucidate a version of truth or to touch on something of the ephemeral. A Treatment is about questions of identity and speaks to the frailty of both the human and physical world in all their incomprehensibility.' (Publication summary)