AustLit

'Ellen van Neerven’s debut collection of poetry, Comfort Food, is a treat for the senses. A poet of Mununjali and Dutch heritage, van Neerven is also an acclaimed author of fiction: her novel, Heat and Light (2014), won the David Unaipon Award and the Dobbie Literary Award. The poems in this impressive collection explore food as an expression of identity, love, and passion.' (Introduction)

'Stuart Barnes’s Glasshouses is poetry set to an almost self-consciously cool soundtrack of throwback hits and B-sides by The Cure, Pulp, Suede, L7, The Stranglers, My Friend the Chocolate Cake, and Antony and the Johnsons. Throw in some late-80s Australian pop courtesy of Kylie Minogue and the Chantoozies and you have an idea of the eclectic mix-tape mash-up that was the winner of the 2015 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.' (Introduction)

'Helen Avery’s Loosely Defined is a warm, lush, rich harvest of poetry despite its predominant setting of the dry outback. Dry the earth may be, out west, but it is far from arid. The landscape is teeming with insects, bird life, and people — all of which are recurring characters in a collection of verse characterised by what Jeffrey Harpeng maintains is “a subdued empathy for person and place.” Indeed, this is an organic poetry, working itself up out of the soil tilled and tended by loving human hands gnarled from labour.' (Introduction)

'Félix Calvino’s So Much Smoke occupies a liminal space between the old world of village life in the Spanish pastoral region of Galicia and the new world of Sydney in the 1970s. This is familiar territory for Calvino, who wrote the short story collection A Hatful of Cherries (2011) and the novella Alfonso (2013), both of which examine the Spanish migrant experience in Australia.' (Introduction)