AustLit

'Dominique Hecq’s After Cage (2^nd edition) is presented on the page as a long poem. Yet, After Cage is more than written lyric poetry: it is a multi-generic performance piece incorporating verse and dance that Hecq calls “an experiment in poiesis” in the afterword. Movement was integral to the conception, refinement, and enactment of After Cage as both a written poetic work and a dance performance in the style of a fugue. While After Cage is a hybrid work, the poem in written form offers insight and impact as a standalone piece.'  (Introduction)

'Rosanna E Licari’s new collection is ambitious in scope and depth. This is Licari’s first major publication since An Absence of Saints (University of Queensland Press, 2010) which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the Anne Elder Award. The sixty-seven poems in this book transport the reader through the course of history from the stirrings of creation and the births of various life forms to accounts of the poet’s own beginnings, her family’s war torn past and the miracle of awakening each day to her subtropical Queensland surroundings. Hope and survival are constant themes.'  (Introduction)

'What is most striking in Hazel Smith’s fifth collection of poetry is the far-ranging scope of topics explored and the wide number of poetic approaches employed, the poet still succeeding in retaining a powerful, unifying voice throughout. Smith’s poems challenge both intellectually and emotionally. Familial poems written in free verse are sandwiched between computer-generated works and list poems. Politically and socially aware poems about Trump, Brexit, the Berlin Wall and Covid-19 share space with poems such as the one that we first encounter, ‘The Collection’ [8-9] in which the poem’s third person narrator confesses to their process of writing and curating the book, a heads up to the reader that the poems in it'  (Introduction)