AustLit

'Fiction is fantasy – or, at least, popular fiction is preoccupied with the fantastical. Wish fulfilment. A life less ordinary. Some sort of magic to free us from the prison of the mundane. A shape-shifting wizard/cat with markings mimicking her spectacles. The announcement of a new and exciting identity for the first-person hero – I, me, myself – a being somehow cognate with the reader who experiences life vicariously through the authorial magic trick of vivifying a fictitious character. Hey, presto: “You’re a wizard, Harry!”' (Introduction)

'Fiction is fantasy – or, at least, popular fiction is preoccupied with the fantastical. Wish fulfilment. A life less ordinary. Some sort of magic to free us from the prison of the mundane. A shape-shifting wizard/cat with markings mimicking her spectacles. The announcement of a new and exciting identity for the first-person hero – I, me, myself – a being somehow cognate with the reader who experiences life vicariously through the authorial magic trick of vivifying a fictitious character. Hey, presto: “You’re a wizard, Harry!”'  (Introduction)

'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)

'In his masterful new short fiction collection, Young Love and Other Stories, Félix Calvino explores the shadows, shades, and occasionally shady dealings of the people who inhabit a village in the Carballo area of Galicia, Spain. The interplay between light and shade, silhouettes, shadows, and mirrors, is central to this collection. These stories of village life are set in a liminal time: post-war but pre-electricity. At the one-room school, the lone teacher makes annual promises that the shrinking village will be connected to the grid the following year, while a dwindling group of ageing men gather after the winter rains each spring to fix the unsealed roads.' (Introduction)

'Rebecca Edwards’ latest collection of poetry, Plague Animals, takes its name from its penultimate poem, “Plague Animals: 1985” (101). The speaker confesses to crying when she first saw the sprawling concrete megalopolis of Tokyo from the window of a bus full of chattering Australian teenagers excited to explore a foreign country under the comforting wings of their host families. The “entire vista” of cement, glass, flyovers, and neon lights “was an accusation: this is what it comes to / you clever, / clever monkeys” (101).' (Introduction)

'You might assume that the poetry of a musician who namechecks Lead Belly, Charles Mingus, and Stevie Wonder would be full of soul. You’d be wrong. Instead, Losing Touch, Andrew Leggett’s third collection, is full of heart. Here, we find the burning hearts of lovers, the strained hearts of the lonely, the dancing hearts of dead poets, the cardiac arrests of the elderly, the steady pulse of youth, the arrythmia of the patient denied a transplant, and the syncopated symphony of all the hearts in the mental hospital beating out of time with the society that shuts them in.' (Introduction)

'When opening a slim volume of poetry entitled Land Art, a reader might expect a collection of ecopoetics. Instead, Stuart Cooke offers what might be termed “egopoetics.” A critical reader of both his own work and the poetry of numerous writers from around the (not just English-speaking) world, Cooke offers an exegesis for Land Art in the Forward. Less an apology, defence, or justification, the Forward is more an exploration of questions raised by writing and drawing about the relationship between poet-speaker and land. For Cooke, writing and sketching are both linguistic artforms, and he points to the history of writing in the West as ineluctable from the aesthetic and the visual. He points to the time before the printing press rendered prose and poetry prosaic and illuminated manuscripts grew scarce. As Cooke observes in the Forward to his collection, “the printed alphabet is embedded in long histories of aesthetic decisions.” ' (Introduction)

'The prolific poet Anne Casey published two collections of poetry in 2021: Salmon Poetry’s The Light We Cannot See and Recent Work Press’s Portrait of a Woman Walking Home. The former is written from the perspective of a displaced daughter of Ireland and apprehensive mother. She fears that her children must endure the traumas that mar our society: the climate crisis, humanitarian disasters, and the Covid-19 pandemic. By contrast, Portrait of a Woman Walking Home is concerned with matters of misogyny and the experience of one woman who might be any woman or Everywoman. In the poet’s urgent message, the particular and the universal converge.'  (Introduction)

'Jane Williams’ Points of Recognition is inherently human poetry. Her concerns are wide-ranging: from empathy to idiosyncrasy, the mundane to the marvellous, compassion to passion, diffidence and restraint to ecstasy and excess. Always she is wondering, inquiring. What does it mean to be human? And what does it mean to be inhumane, even inhuman, in our treatment of others?' (Introduction)

'Melinda Smith’s eighth collection of poetry, Man-Handled, is essential reading for anyone who has followed the depiction of women in the Australian media, political, and public spheres, or who has suffered or witnessed gendered violence in the private realm. The collection is divided into six sections: “Exposures,” “The space inside his fist,” “Listen, bitch,” “The Night Book,” “Fugal States,” and “Ventriloquies.” The power of Smith’s poetry to reveal shocking truths reaches boiling point midway through the book. Yet, even after this scalding surge, the verse still simmers with subtle force.'  (Introduction)

'Vanessa Page’s fifth collection of poetry, Botanical Skin, is as resonant as a bell ringing out at dusk – a liminal time. Indeed, several of Page’s poems are set at dusk, and she is often concerned with the blurring of boundaries, the breakdown of barriers, and the breaching of borders. Split into two alliterative sections, “Body” and “Bloom,” Botanical Skin is concerned with another “b” word: blue. In her forward, Page quotes Yves Klein: “Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.” Page observes that poetry also transcends dimensionality. Certainly, this is true of Botanical Skin. Although it is divided into two sections, poems call to each other across the divide, with words often recurring throughout, including forms of “bloom,” “love,” and “deep.”' (Introduction)

'Angela Costi’s An Embroidery of Old Maps and New charts a process of mapping human interactions through embroidery. Costi is part of the Cypriot-Greek diaspora, and her grandmother used her embroidery skills to rise above poverty before she moved to Melbourne. There, Costi’s mother and sisters worked the machines at a sewing factory. In 2009, Costi travelled to Japan to work with the Stringraphy Ensemble, so it might not be too great a leap of the imagination to liken the stitches of Costi’s verse to sashiko, Japanese embroidery. Sashiko takes on a form distinct from European embroidery traditions in the movements required to create the stitches. Sashiko literally means “little stabs,” and, indeed, there are little stabs to the heart to be found and felt among the rich poetry in this collection.'  (Introduction)

'There are those who caution against judging a book by its cover. However, were you to pluck Jane Frank’s Wide River from the bookstore shelf, feeling compelled to dive into the marvellous, multi-hued blue river painting on the cover, you would find your choice vindicated by the poetry within. Frank is a poet of endings. Her last lines are replete with meaning, some forming a clever volta, others punching home the point of a poem with the power of a Shakespearean heroic couplet.'  (Introduction)

'In her debut collection, The Beating Heart, Denise O’Hagan takes Father Time as her muse. Timelessness, timeliness, and time-signatures abound in a collection that features O’Hagan’s trademarked musicality. Her poetry is rhythmical and melodic, with rhyme, half-rhyme, alliteration, and assonance her favoured forms of wordplay. O’Hagan has an ear for words that work together to trip off the tongue in pleasing patterns. At times the words waltz across the page; at others, the text clings close to the left-hand margin. Although Father Time may be O’Hagan’s main muse, other family members and their time on Earth – equal to the duration of The Beating Heart of the title – are also focal points of the poems. Mother, grandmother, and infant son are the subjects of several sequences in this engaging collection.' (Introduction)

'Dominique Hecq’s tripartite long poem Kaosmos playfully plays the tape on a loop and spins the record backwards, like a DJ on a mission to mesmerise. Words repeat; phrases resurface; literary allusions abound. It’s an exuberant display.' (Introduction)

'In the brilliant and unsettling Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, Benjamin Dodds takes as his muse a chimpanzee called Lucy. This is a nuanced and complex reimagining of a true story. Lucy is raised as the “daughter” of the Temerlin family for thirteen years as part of a university cross-fostering program. Dr Maurice Temerlin, a psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Oklahoma, his wife Jane, a social worker and academic, and their son Steve have their lives upended when they adopt Lucy. Yet, although Lucy is seen as a disruptive and destructive force by the Temerlins’ neighbours and visitors, the reverse is true: it is humans who have derailed her existence irrevocably, with disastrous consequences.'  (Introduction)

'Siarad is a volume of poetry and prose by Caroline Reid, a playwright and repeat finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam. The word “siarad” is Welsh for “to talk; to speak,” and this collection is partly about the idea of the voice as an authentic expression of self. However, as the reader might expect given Reid’s background, Siarad is primarily concerned with the performative nature of speech: speaking as oration, story-weaving, lying, the telling of deeper truths, myth and fable, and siren song. Reid’s poems and short stories are allegorical in their impact: seemingly mundane events are elevated to the symbolic and the sacred.' (Introduction)

'The winner of the 2019 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award, Melinda Bufton’s Moxie is a delightfully dark, wryly observed, feminist-staged corporate takeover of the language of business and commerce. The speaker of the poems is a young woman with more than moxie to recommend her – even through her phases of self-doubt or submission to the company machine, she has chutzpah and inner strength as she rails against the monotony, misogyny, and relentless soul-selling. Of the many threads of meaning in this collection, the most striking is the resurfacing of the imagery of clothing and appearance.'(Introduction)

'Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today is an anthology of poetry and essays edited by the Gomeroi poet and academic Alison Whittaker. It should prove an indispensable addition to the canon of First Nations poetry. This new anthology may take its cue from the seminal work edited by Kevin Gilbert, Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry. Gilbert’s anthology was published in 1988 – the year the country marked its bicentennial of colonial rule with colourful advertisements featuring the jingle, “Celebration of a nation.” One of the aims of the anthology was to disrupt the notion of celebration.'(Introduction)

'The vistas of Rosalee Kiely’s poems in Creature are not landscape paintings. A landscape is usually devoid of animal life – apart from the occasional grazing ungulate if painted in the pastoral mode – and is, by necessity, still: a moment suspended in time. By contrast, Kiely’s poems are teeming with fauna, including that seemingly most perverse of species, homo sapiens. These are lively, life-documenting poems, often darkly comic but sometimes darkly sombre.' (Introduction)