'A collection of stand-alone poems, certain themes and preoccupations bind the poems of Present together - family, friendship, loss and acceptance, the attempt to gain meaning from the experiences of daily life. Allen's work is confessional poetry: poetry of the personal and the "I". In her poems, she attempts to convey that which can't be expressed by traditional autobiographical modes of writing. The poems of Present are also concerned with distance - the distances between our real and imagined selves, between the past and the present, between people, and how in all relationships we constantly juggle intimacy and connection with what is unfamiliar and strange. This is true of the characters within Allen's poems, but also of the relationship between the narrator of the poems and the reader. Although conversational and plain-spoken, the "I" found in most of these poems cannot be taken for granted as a reliable and stable narrator. This collection experiments with form as well as voice, including found poems, dramatic monologues and extended prose poems.' (Publication summary)

'Editing an anthology of poets from New South Wales is both a wonderful and confronting task. Wonderful because you get to spend close-reading time with the work of poets that you greatly admire; confronting because of all the excellent poets you might include. However, one can take comfort in the fact that this anthology is going to be an annual occurrence, and in that sense cumulative, with a new cohort of six poets each year. I look forward to seeing it unfolding over time in its various iterations, and I feel honoured to present this inaugural collection.' (Introduction)

'Series One of the New South Wales  States of Poetry anthology is edited by Elizabeth Allen and features poetry by poems by Susie Anderson, Pam Brown, Toby Fitch, David Malouf, Kate Middleton, and Fiona Wright. '