AustLit

'Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines.' (Publication summary)

'Do not be afraid to think.

'Test form, renew form, or defy it.

'Know there is a new permission to speak, and for more voices.

'Not to censure, censor our inheritances—in which there is still the cherishable, the followable—but to question, yes, that. To make that effort, with caring, love, and as needed, fierceness.

'To write, read the self, which can also be multiple, as are our inheritances, and also within if wished for, community.

'When I first devised the idea of this New Series two years ago, it was intended to be celebratory, motivated by the current flourishing which is occurring in poetry and poetry publication in Australia. In it, another poet/critic or poetry community associate is ‘allied’ with a new or recent Australian poetry collection, be that an individual volume, or an anthology, or another platform. Some books go back a little (there is one from 2017), but most are of the past 12-24 months; the impetus was to make tribute to a splendid range of contemporary Australian poetry publishing.' (Jacinta Le Plastrier, Introduction)

'Best of Australian Poems is a new annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry, across a timeframe of 1 July 2020 - 30 June 2021, the series will explore how poetic responses to the contemporary moment develop with each passing year.

'The book opens with an introduction by its 2021 editors, award-winning poets Ellen van Neerven and Toby Fitch. They discuss their approach to curating the 'aural events' of this inaugural anthology, which features 100 poems across a considered, also provocative at times, range of poetic voices, approaches and themes.

'The Best of Australian Poems (BoAP) series is published by Australia's national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry, and will feature two different guest editors each year.' (Publication summary)