Cirrus@Austlit

'Best of Australian Poems is a new annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot of the year that was.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)

'This new anthology of Australian and New Zealand poetry is remarkable for its exuberance, its vitality, and the notably youthful vibrancy of its free verse as well as its innovative prose poetry.  Including a wide range of voices from such well-known poets as John Kinsella, Pam Brown, and John Tranter to relative new-comers like Chris Tse and essa may ranapiri, The Language in my Tongue is full of surprises and special pleasures.

—Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English
 at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor
 of English Emerita at the University of Southern California

'Here are vernaculars. Here are modern-day classics. Here is a “mind in an unclear world,” “a space perfection will never survive.”  Here is invention permitted to travel the world, in dense prose poems and in chatty ones, in capable free verse and ghazals, “emissaries” and “a russet lock in an envelope.” Here Echnida meets the Spider, “making things transparent,” and here [is] bodily frailty and erotic love. Here, readers, are some highlights of the Antipodes, two—no, far more than two—poetic traditions, made available for you. Investigate. Drink deep.

—Stephanie Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University'  (Publication summary)