AustLit

'Body Poems collects the body, in its total glory and filthiness, and gleefully displays it in 15 grotesque poems. They are joyful poems about the body. They are unapologetically violent and paranoid and dark poems about the body. They are flippant and sensual and funny poems about the body. They are simple and easy-to-read and surprising poems about the body. They are poems best read on an empty stomach. In Body Poems, things happen simultaneously. The tender is brutal, the brutal tender. You are allowed to be disgusting and you are allowed to be delicious. Here beauty arrives in the most surprising disguises. This is a dizzying, fearless collection.' (Publication summary)

'Book autodescription: Chords of time. Common places where you can get stuck and thrive. A mad survivalist's loot. From homeless to discarded pocket cathedrals to return back to a citadel after years of science and sands.'(Publication summary)

'‘Dimitra Harvey's poems stand out for their arresting images and lines, for the precision with which they gather often raw, conflicting moments of perception. Harvey's poems inhabit dry, scarred, searing places, often bristling with menace, and speak them with the utmost eloquence and faithfulness to detail. At times exquisitely beautiful, at times a powerful register of human violence, A Fistful of Hail offers a wise and thoughtful collection of works to be read and reread.’—Peter Boyle

''I couldn’t resist Dimitra Harvey’s evocatively brocaded poem about yellow-tailed black cockatoos, Calyptorhynchus funereus. Astute observation is at the heart of this poem, the poet’s careful pinpointing of particulars is what makes it so memorable, but the poem is so much more than just descriptive, it evokes many tones of mood and it richly maps the birds to landscape, weather and to folklore ... What I enjoyed most is the way the birds intensely haunt the imagination of the speaker … We can see in Dimitra Harvey’s poem how the poetic imagination depends upon emotion, so that by the end, the speaker’s deep connection to the birds allows for an expansion and activation of knowledge.' —Judith Beveridge, Cordite.'(Publication summary)

'In The Last Postman, a girl delivers letters addressed to travellers in carriages on a train. The Last Postman is a chapbook of unusual poetic letters that give intimate glimpses into the lives of everyday characters. With themes of the domestic, yearning, hope, and a hint of magical realism, these are poems of quiet and acute observation grounded in the experience of a familiar contemporary urban environment.'  (Publication summary)

'In this spare and sharply observed collection of poems is the essence of a human story: what transpires when, despite all reason, we love someone who makes it difficult to love them. The imagery is a shocking and sometimes bleakly humorous mixture of the intimacies of blood and drink with the detachment of words and memories – perhaps most of all the final detachment of writing itself. ' (Publication summary)

'The measure of skin navigates the surging waves of anti-identity sweeping the world today, where one’s propensity to stand out in the crowd — because of skin colour and gender persuasion — becomes a howl for acceptance and recognition in the streets where humanity thrives, in the walls where hope breathes, in another’s touch where love resides. They are poems that are not just about love, but of how love and faith in one’s identity transcend the ideals of a normative reality.' (Publication summary)

'‘Behind my eyes are the eyes of a horse looking out’. In this dynamic collection of prose poems, Misbah Khokar spins a bright new compass over fragmented, improvised worlds. Her poetry scopes the aftershocks of imperialism and voices wild new visions, bringing us to the territory behind the eyes. With what James Baldwin called ‘perception at the pitch of passion’, Khokhar's poems stun with their sudden intensities, their casual intimacies, their mapping of psychic expansions out of place. Their vocal resonance is emotionally protean—tones move swiftly from cool doom to playful grace—expressing the pleasures of observation and the strange consolations of unbelonging. —Lucy Van' (Publication summary)