AustLit

'In The Drink is the unflinching second poetry collection from Emily Crocker. Poems stream through In The Drink, collecting hauntings of desire and futures lost. Visceral and at times crushingly funny, In The Drink truly makes poetry of a working class queerness.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'What if when we wrote our names we forgot them, every time, every word? In apocalypse scroll like it was normal, kenji kinz dispenses a heady homebrew of poetic and essayistic offerings from and to the undercommons, those common (under)grounds we hold and that hold us. Following the insurgent and inventive intensity of innumerable others, kinz (dis)locates contemporary conceptualisations of multiple and overlapping apocalypses with a concern less for the doom-and-gloom of an assumed 'before' and 'after' and more for the seemingly unending stasis of the here-and-now. From the city to the suburbs, at the action and at the afterparty, this text attempts to recognise and remember, to elaborate and extend an inheritance that we cannot recall, suggesting ultimately that perhaps the answers we seek are not only (im)possible but already everywhere underway.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A pile of rats having an identity crisis. A sexy robot rebellion. A velociraptor revenge wedding. The world’s horniest scientist. Enter Sexy Tales of Paleontology: a world of queer romance, (dis)connection, and artifical intelligence told with Patrick Lenton’s idiosyncratic bizarreness and heart.

'Lenton’s short stories combine laugh-out-loud humour with an honest-to-goodness sensibility. Sci-fi oddities, pop culture, a lesser-known Kardashian who lives on the moon, and a deft turn of comic absurdity bound through this truly queer romp of a book. But beyond all this, at the beating heart of the book, is the foolishness, horror, and delight that is love and heartbreak and 43 rats.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Prepare to have your heart warmed, tickled, shattered, and put back together with sticky tape as Uncle Hercules and other lies barrels through a collection of tender and tenderised non-fictions.

'Shortlisted for the Scribe Non-fiction Prize, Uncle Hercules and other lies is gooey with incroyable half-fibs, formative moments, and bad life choices. Think Lydia Davis meets Arthur Bradford but on a chair lift; or John Waters meets Leslie Knope by a happenchance procured by a snake. Also, Skyrim Dog.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A wheeze is the sound air makes when it hits the constricted trachea, the sound of meat meeting air. wheeze is a collection of poems about the ghostly possession of the body. It's desire as a force and not a lack. It's Pazuzu from The Exorcist. It's compulsive journalling. It's the reading someone else's body language as a gothic form of divination. It's the dark art of crushing, when the consuming thought of that distant other person enters you through the windpipe like a second body.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

''Poetry is / can / be anything … everything,' says When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon. She is sleepy, but they cannot sleep. It is 4:44 a.m. loneliness, this restlessness. The soft hue of blue from the TV bathes the room via a 24/7 lo-fi livestream. ‘Poems are troubled into existence’ – When I die, she read that somewhere, but cannot remember where, but it has stayed, it is the underpinning of this book and all that contains with/in/out. Where did these bruises come from? The heart, the brain, the heart, the soul? How do I live? How do I keep on living? I don’t know, is the honest answer. I must, is the honest honest answer.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The poems in The Hostage explore the give and take of desire, being taken by language, art, or a higher-power, and the curious drift of experience.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'blur by the is a collection of fractures that make not quite a whole. It is a giving of permission to the self, to exist as messily as ( i s ). These poems are a record of navigation through longing and dis [ place ] ment of the body and of place, a shattering of expectation(s) of the self and of family, often through dreams, food and eroticism. blur by the is an attempt at freedom.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'HAUNT (THE KOOLIE) is a neo-hoodoo meditation and exorcism of racial bigotry from a decolonial, Mauritian-Australian perspective.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Naming by Aisyah Shah Idil is full of surprises as this remarkable debut collection pulls apart the threads of liminality and traces their paths across culture, family, and environment. Shah Idil’s experimental sense provides a transformative frame for an uncompromising lyricism, pushing outwards beyond the pages and prodding at the edges of memory and oblivion. Shah Idil’s poetry is magical and relentless, brimming with love.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2nd ed.).