AustLit

'Award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic Sarah Holland-Batt takes the helm again as editor of this year’s Best Australian Poems. ' (Publication summary)

'‘Emerging’ is a strange word, and ‘strange’ is probably a cop out. It is often arbitrary, sometimes condescending, frequently empowering and often carries with it an incredible sense of community. To emerge is a term that shifts and contradicts; when are we ever not emerging? How is emergence something that rests when we are forever in a process of moving – always surfacing and then submerging – a process that continually repeats and folds into itself? The term ‘young’ has its own problems, and of course you don’t necessarily have to be young to be emerging and to be emerging isn’t necessarily to be young. Use these as modifiers for ‘poet’ and things necessarily get more complicated.' (Introduction)