AustLit

'The Director and the Daemon follows the director of a big budget Australian sci-fi TV show grappling with the dilemma of corporate sponsorship, and their infatuation with their beautiful but selfish lead star, Kit; and an unnamed young radical struggling to find themselves as their political movement―and the found family derived from it―implodes around them. The two characters’ worlds become increasingly interconnected as they’re forced to make big decisions, and take action, in the face of civil unrest.

'The Director and the Daemon is a character-driven novel of ideas that is beautiful, funny, provocative, and deeply felt. It pokes fun at the arts industry, even as it values creativity and art-making, while asking difficult questions about action without ideology and ideology without action. It challenges all of us to think about how we can move from passivity to change, especially in the face of climate change.' (Publication summary)

'The Horizon Shift Sideways displays an informed curiosity about the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it ― both human and animal ― and the entanglements and interactions that exist between these. The unique directness of her work is a result of the combination of the scientific and the aesthetic, combined with characteristic clear-eyed observation.' (Publication summary)

'Chester is the first Australian poet to write poetry in the jokey, colloquial style of what is known as the New York school ― poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, who threw phrases at the page like an action painting, and treated meanings as objects to toy with and abandon. Ten years younger than the founding members of the New York school, Chester was writing poems like theirs at about the same time ― starting in the second half of the 1950s. He is unlikely to have read their work.' (Publication summary)

'Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia’s most polluted urban waterway, the ‘Cooks River’, to a discursive rumination on the history of whaling from the cliffs of Kamay, and an archival interrogation of Australia’s colonial ‘coalture’ on the NSW South Coast, the three ‘drifts’ gathered here weave the poet’s own bodily thought-steps to a socio-historical critique of three ‘resources’ key to the early colonial project: water, whales, and coal. As an Eco-Marxist experiment in poetic composition, or poetic composting, these local histories are further drawn into conversation with the transnational free-market forces that shaped them. Through this stratigraphic interpretation of ‘place’ ― one where the poet’s own relation to different social, cultural, and historical strata is brought into question through a network of exchange ― Holocene Pointbreaks points toward a type of eco-antipoetics: an interrogation of not only human and nonhuman relations, but the very nature of nature, and what it means to write ‘ecopoetry’ as a settler on the unceded lands of First Nations People.' (Publication summary)

'Award-winning poet Paul Mitchell’s fourth collection is a tour-de-force. As always, he both questions and engages with matters of spirituality and religion in High Spirits, while scaling the heights and plumbing the depths of human experience. Through themes of mortality, addiction, pop culture, mystical experience, and parenting, Mitchell’s vernacular style shifts comfortably between the urbane and the deeply philosophical.' (Publication summary)

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'Panthers & the Museum of Fire is a novella about walking, memory and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney cafe to return a manuscript by a recently-dead writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator's entire world: life with family and neighbours, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance through a brush with religion, her anorexia, the exercise of that power when she was powerless in every other aspect of her life.' (Publication summary)

'The Interpretation of Cakes is like no other novel you have ever read and is one novel that you will never forget.

'It’s 1916 and Isaak Brodsky has inherited his family’s patisserie in the Jewish quarter of Budapest. Here, in the midst of shelves overcrowded with marvellous, mouth-watering cakes, Isaak discovers that offering his customers the right cake leads to their spiritual growth and his own. And so, the twentieth century science of Cake-analysis is born.

'This novel brings Budapest’s cafés, streets and people to life in a charming, joyous and irresistible romp through the beginnings of psychotherapy and the mysteries of the conscious and unconscious mind. Thinking, and indeed, eating cake, will never be the same again.' (Publication summary)

'Within this robust and delicate collection, Morgan Yasbincek simultaneously explores and invokes a constellation of poetic voices that all, ultimately, resolve into the nothing which gives them birth. Presence gives way to absence and absence hints at something beyond a restoration of presence, something her poems take seriously and ground through disruption, 'the vowels of silence', and the truth of life, lived, grieved and continued.

'Ever becoming, and eternally un-becoming, this intimate and sensual collection brings us close to tongues which become plants, daughters who unfold through Ancient Hindu plays and verdant landscapes which are forever speaking of the stillness beyond all things. All is animate, all have voices here, even in the silence and darkness of separation and loss. With Sappho as compañera and the Fragment pointing to what always is, Morgan's crafting of words awakens a world we have always known and always failed to name.' (Publication summary)

'This is supposedly the fictional biography of a street storyteller by the name of Ah Sin active during the gold-digging days of the 1850s and 1860s in Victoria, Australia, told by Zhang Baohui, a mainland Chinese student working on a PhD thesis in creative writing, at Laurendal University, under the supervision of Professor Stacey Ahsin.

'As Baohui delves deeper into Australia's past, he weaves the story of Ah Sin with his own by turning the academically required exegesis into a hodgepodge of his thought bursts, diary entries, carefully reported memory lapses, mini-historical stories, fragmentary pieces of poetry, philosophical musings on history and fiction, and his own story of illness, sexual ambiguities, and love or impossibility of love.' (Publication summary)

'What is this Perec-ish chimera if not an elegy, folded into an existential meditation, situated in a suite of sites used as formal constraints. I confess to being astonished and awed. The Inclination Compass is a surpassing text, a gargantuan arrival. Nodal, algorithmic, ergodic — is there anything else like it in Australian literature?
—Dan Disney

'What would a poetry book be like that brings together Swedenborg, lunatic asylums, abandoned World War Two bunkers, homelessness, homing silvereyes, Shigeaki’s locker art, and much much more, using QR codes to take us into new sensory experiences, fusing film, music, theatre, visual art and poetry, that is a little like Beckett, a little like Joyce, a little like Tarkovsky, like and unlike Blake, where “lured into space by the gravitational pull of bright moons/ everyone woke up dead”? Such is Gareth Jenkins’ experimental tour de force. With its complex shifting layers and consistent verbal flair The Inclination Compass demonstrates what a fully alive, truly innovative multi-media 21st Century epic poem might look like.
—Peter Boyle

'A visionary fever dream, a non-linear medley of incantations – The Inclination Compass is the surreal and immersive second collection from Anne Elder Award winning Gareth Sion Jenkins. These poems echo and haunt in their self-referential, regenerating narrative – they are forever remixing and unravelling themselves, whether you’re still reading them or not. This book is both like and unlike any poetry you’ve read before.
—Rae White

Although its technique and imagery allow pro table comparison with the writings of Francis Ponge and Samuel Beckett, The Inclination Compass exceeds the routine parameters of poetry and literature. As the remarkable culmination of an artlife project shaped by poetry, installation, performance, film and collage, which draws upon analytical psychology, fiction, philosophy and science, it is driven by a torrential creative ambition to discover new means of mapping phenomena, experience and the mind. Exploring the regions between dream, recollection, fantasy and the secret motivations of language, Gareth Jenkins shuns routine paths of knowledge, and that is one reason why the stunning, elusive imagery of The Inclination Compass observes its reader with understanding eyes.
—Gavin Parkinson

'The Inclination Compass is a highly original, ambitious, defamiliarising book that creates its own reality or inscape. Meditative and incantatory, the writing stretches out towards the non-verbalisable. The method is recombinant: it employs techniques of repetition combined with variation to create a fascinating permutational extravaganza. The intriguing multimedia elements embedded throughout the book — which combine sound, visual images, text performance, installation, gesture and dance — have their own repetitions and variations. These elements complement and contrast with the printed page, making the totality a richly layered, multi-sensory, multi-locational experience.
—Hazel Smith' (Publication summary)

'Best of Australian Poems is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot and barometer of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry across a timeframe of 1 July 2022–1 August 2023, the series (now in its third year) will explore how poetic responses to the contemporary moment develop with each passing year.' 

'The 2023 book opens with an introduction by its editors, highly respected poets and editors Gig Ryan and Panda Wong. Gig Ryan is one of the country’s most highly recognised and read poets, with major awards for her poetry over decades, and a prominent publication profile both here and overseas. Panda Wong is on the vanguard of Australian literature as a poet, editor and performer whose work spans the page, stage and digital space. Previous editors of this prestigious series have been Ellen van Neerven and Toby Fitch (2021), and Jeanine Leane and Judith Beveridge (2022).

'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, to amplify the range of voices selected. It is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and individual patrons.' (Publication summary)

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'Warm and wry, mixing high culture and suburban realism, the laconic and the artful, Anything Can Happen is a memoir from one of Australia’s literary trailblazers. Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about storytelling and lies and how truth and memory are complex. It keeps in play so many things: irony and spirituality, a slice of social history of Sydney’s inner west, a farm in Victoria, a lesbian subculture, Mardi Gras, the literary pleasures of teaching writing. Juxtaposition is her gift, as is the very natural speaking voice. With the eye of a poet, and the dry drollery of someone who has experienced it all, straight and married, gay and married, mother, friend, lover, writer, this is a raw and powerful account of a life lived fully.' (Publication summary)

'The riotous rollercoaster ride of Mental as Anything, Australia's greatest party band from 1976-2019. The Mentals went from the top of a pool table to the top of the charts. Enjoy the untold stories behind Aussie classics like: Live It Up, Too Many Times, If You Leave Me Can I Come Too?, Berserk Warriors, Egypt, The Nips are Getting Bigger, and a whole lot more. Plus tales from the road as told by Greedy, Martin, Bird, Pete & Reg — and a star-studded cast including Colin Hay, Richard Gottehrer, Mark Opitz, Jeremy Fabinyi and Wreckless Eric — in this access-all-areas official biography.' (Publication summary)

'A wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to our bones, our psyches, our flesh. A Japanese soprano has lost her voice and seeks repose on a sailing boat in Corsica. A South African advertising executive learns the ropes at his Accra office. Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. In London, a Rome-based man happens upon a woman from the past, bringing back a passionate interlude he has hidden from himself. Lovers meet, fade, delude. We are weak and defiant beings, ever-learning, ever-lustful.' (Publication summary)

'Philip Salom’s major new collection explores human and natural existence - as life-force and loss, and for diverse symptoms of achievement and folly. His intense scrutiny gives air to the unavoidable complexity of voices raised and voices ignored. Whether it’s injury and mortality (our own) or disturbance and urgency (our climate), Salom uses a subtle insight and a roving, inventive wit to create interweaving fugues through time and memory. Within this, his fifteenth collection, the KGB might even read a brilliant taxonomy of their leader with enough alarm to ensure the poet is fed calming tea. But these are serious times, and these poems are meditative acts of witness.'(Publication summary)

'One River is a series of haibun studies of the Hunter River and its tributaries. Haibun is a Japanese poetic form of prose punctuated by haiku. In this instance, the longer, but still brief, Korean sijo are employed as lively sketches of the birds, trees, weather and waterways encountered in the author's wanderings. The heart of this book are unique meditations on the river and its hinterland. In their whimsical complexity—and leaps of imagination—they constitute overlooked truths, truths distinct from those that arise from objective observation. These poems are an immersive experience, one in which the reader might find a nascent sense of their capacity for flow as is manifest in the limber movements of water falling.' (Publication summary)

'Out of the Blocks is the debut full-length poetry collection from Newcastle based poet Ellen Shelley. Curiosity, memory and deep feeling can be found in these poems that play with the dark edges of the lyrical I and explore the complexity in particular of human relationships, and the desire at times, to be outside of them.'(Publication summary)