AustLit

'In 1922, when Katharine Susannah Prichard’s son, Ric, was born, she had him placed in what she called his Bolshevik gown, ‘the little gown I had embroidered with wheat ears and a hammer and sickle.’ It’s a cute story, but also a prescient gesture towards Prichard’s decades-long, unwavering loyalty to Stalin and the Soviet Union. Prichard’s writing, Nathan Hobby’s biography reveals, was matched in intensity by her political activities. With these two pillars of interests set alongside each other in detailed accounts of her literary habits (in her early career she was a frequent submitter to writing prizes), and later her political organising (setting up CPA branches, travelling the country to give rousing speeches about the fight for communism in Australia), we see the broader picture emerge of a woman who was intensely engaged with her world, and with a seemingly unstoppable energy to pour back into it. Her prolific writing practice only seemed to be interrupted when her party duties took over. Even towards the end of her life, she reignited a writing habit: two hours per day. Prichard remained active in her political party until late into life and, even towards the end, living as an elderly eccentric, she managed to hold court, frequently hosting friends and visitors. There is a felt sense, in this biography, of her boundless energy.' (Introduction)

'How much time and energy does it take to fall in love? Or rinse mottled wings? Does Alexandra Kollontai represent a spectre of utopian promises, or merely a blank space for fantasies of desire and revolution?  This series of poems takes us through nineties socialist science fiction, family abolition, mulberry lipstick, shirts, cardigans, maxi dresses, hyenas, quitting work and spells cast with yeast extract. It is poetry for girls, poetry for communism; it’s poetry for history and for the impossible future. ' (Publication summary)

'Dhananjaya Rajaratnam has lived in Sydney for four years. He goes by the name Danny, has blond-tipped hair and has long abandoned the course that once qualified him for a student visa. Now he cleans houses for inner-city professionals and lives in the storeroom of a convenience store. Danny is invisible to most Australians around him, but lives in constant fear of being deported. This fear is mixed with Danny’s quirky reflections on English idioms and the physical traits and mannerisms of the locals he wants to blend in with.' (Introduction)

'Toby Fitch is a poet who has not only published a number of books, most recently Where the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond, 2019), but also worked across many different roles in the literary community. Aside from writing award-winning poetry – his book Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann) won the 2012 Grace Leven Prize for poetry – he also teaches creative writing, runs workshops and events, including the monthly poetry reading night at Sappho Books Café & Wine Bar, a Sydney institution, and is poetry editor at Overland magazine. I was lucky enough to catch Toby in person during a brief Sydney visit, and we met at his local pub, Newtown’s Carlisle Castle, to talk about poetry games, the limits of precarity for poets and Robert Klippel.' (Introduction)

'I once wrote to a poetry advice column because I was afraid of my emotions and the havoc they wreaked on me. I called them ‘a huge problem’ but Diana Hamilton responded: ‘Feeling pleasure is a legitimate way of developing as a person-writer!’

'We got a kitten and I tried to write poems for her. Or some other (many) times I had a thought and realised I shouldn’t say it out loud only to find myself speaking it. When these turned to poems. Could there be a poet in the sense of a hare or another graceful creature or perhaps bitter and less warm-blooded. Like endives.

'Or when you want to write poems for the world but … and maybe a museum exhibition about a colonial botanist who collected timber specimens.

'Joined a reading group with some people who turned out to almost all be poets we read Das Kapital volume 1 which stuck with me I think my communist spirit which was born that year was also part poet.

'It’s sometimes like a heat pack muscle relaxant & then you finally can read in bed in the evenings without checking on your cat.

'I’m afraid to share more because of what emotions have done to my poetry but you can read and devein them in your own time. There is a YouTube tutorial for it probably.

'Or full communism or how Amy De’Ath says ‘i wish for us another world where we might live freely … a world of dank memes and slick gifs’.

'–Elena Gomez' (Publication summary)