Life Before Man Life Before Man i(20877405 works by) (Organisation) assertion
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1 y separately published work icon She Goes to Town Sandra Renew , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2024 28241608 2024 selected work poetry

'She Goes to Town explores the tensions between leaving and staying, crossing lines, endings and beginnings. In poetry, micro-lit, short prose there is a mapping of the path to destruction and the saving graces of hope and trying again

‘She separates herself. There are different voices

here, and

separations. Cutting away

from her past, from varied, acceptable and

permissible futures

dreamed into expectations by others on her

behalf. From 

always being a dangerous difference in a

country town,

and rural school. Segue to wide-eyed in the city, to

wild eyed, in a

city never imagined.’

'In She Goes to Town Sandra Renew writes as a lesbian poet. She shows a gendered world from the point of view of an outsider and one who lives on the fringes of heterosexuality, and who fully inhabits a voice of dissent and protest. She deep-dives into gender and comments on living in both urban and rural communities.'

1 y separately published work icon G-d, Sleep, and Chaos Alan Fyfe , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2024 28241571 2024 selected work poetry

'G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is a prayer of thanks for a broken world.

'Alan Fyfe’s debut collection employs a core of Jewish philosophy to explore themes of love, metaphysics, the self-destructive impulse, trauma, and the transcendent. With a boisterous affection for all things absurd and liminal and a bristling loyalty to working class aesthetics, G-d, Sleep, and Chaos includes poems that swing from visceral to hilarious across seven sections, and a range of forms, to ask how we might come by gratitude, and the peace of silence, in our bleakest moments. G-d, Sleep, and Chaos is a collection for the questing mind and the wanting spirit.' (Publication summary)

1 y separately published work icon Flight Shady Cosgrove , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2024 28241534 2024 selected work poetry 'A household in flux, a global pandemic, and the mystifying negotiations and permutations of love. Often otherworldly, frequently affirming, and sometimes heartbreaking, these poems offer small meditations — circling overhead, descending into daily life.' (Publication summary)
1 y separately published work icon Soft Side of Red Christine Shamista , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2023 26846150 2023 selected work poetry

'In her debut poetry collection Christine Shamista reflects on her experiences living in Sri Lanka, England and Australia as part of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Shamista’s poems reveal layers of the self through her journey leaving her ancestral home in the time of a civil war and living in and between England and Australia.

'Her poetry recounts experiences of racism ― casual and systemic ― and her discovering delight and pride in race and identity despite these experiences.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon Alogopoiesis Amelia Walker , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2023 26846104 2023 selected work poetry

'Alogia is a condition of reduced or absent speech. Poiesis is making. Alogopoiesis therefore forges a poetics of the unstated, a making of meanings from what’s not there. Poems in this book explore experiences of domestic violence, queer heartbreak, and mental illness, among other topics that are often hushed up or hard to voice. Surreal symbolism interweaves with bare personal accounts, prose poetry with flash fiction and lyric verse. Sequences of erasure, fragmentation and revision mobilise gaps and omissions as sites of significance. The book in entirety forms a macro-poem in which rhythms of repetition and variation continually reconfigure the parts that form the whole. The result is a speaking of silence through form acting as content, and thereby, a raising of issues for which greater attention is deserved.' (Publication summary)

1 2 y separately published work icon If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2023 26364222 2023 selected work poetry

'If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is the second full-length collection from award-winning poet Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon.

'Exploring one the most personal and politically charged experiences in many women's lives - motherhood - this collection of poems was born within the vortex of America's changing social landscape as Obama's message of inclusion gave way to a wave of Trump emboldened exclusion.

'Using various poetic styles ranging from the avant-garde techniques of erasure and cut-up poetry to re- working of traditional forms such as the ghazal, pantoum and sestina, the work encourages the reader to venture beyond the clich©s of motherhood to not only explore its intimacy and beauty, but its deep and abiding contradictions.

'Exploring subject matter such as the choices we make to become mothers or not, the contents of a little boy's pockets on wash day, fractured hearts, broken tea cups, and the destruction of a butterfly chrysalis by a toddler joyfully oblivious to consequence, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is an unvarnished and revealing recounting of one woman's journey through motherhood.' (Publication summary)

1 1 y separately published work icon How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up Lisa Collyer , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2023 26364185 2023 selected work poetry

'How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is a conversation in poems about the taboo and invisible experiences of female bodies. Themes include the infertile and the aged as abject. Women's representation in literature is typically self-sacrificing with the aged and childless seen as pitiful. Collyer gives agency to alternative experiences of womanhood to disrupt women's consignment to nature as earth mother.

'This poetry-cum-memoir juxtaposes bodies with ecology and a poetics of space to represent domestic trauma and escape. Home is a frequent setting as a place to dread and ultimately escape representing family violence towards women.

'How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up was shortlisted for the eminent Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript.' (Publication summary)

1 y separately published work icon Hear Here Judith Bishop , Sydney : Life Before Man , 2022 27508435 2022 single work poetry
1 y separately published work icon Wrestling with Bees Natalie Cooke , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2022 24999493 2022 selected work poetry 'Evocative and playful by turn, Natalie Cooke’s first collection is preoccupied by Australian landscapes, what we look at in them and what we don’t. A diverse range of forms, from haiku to pattern poems, reflects on ‘palimpsest landscapes of overlay, erasure’ and the flora and fauna living there — including us. Finely drawn observations about magpies and mosquitos sit alongside musings on maps and modernist art in this exploration of our changing environment.' 

 (Publication summary)

1 y separately published work icon Still Lives Kimberly K. Williams , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2022 24999456 2022 selected work poetry 'A mix of both lineated and prose poems, the pieces in Still Lives experiment with space on the page and play with sound and form as the book itself examines place and what it means to be here or there.'  (Publication summary)
1 1 y separately published work icon Collected Prose Poems Gary Catalano , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2021 23066084 2021 collected work poetry prose

'Gary Catalano was an important Australian poet. His talent was exquisitely refined, both in his subtle verse and in the prose poetry which he took to a higher pitch of excellence than any other Australian has attained.' — Les Murray

'The recent decade has witnessed a rapid rise in the number of Australian poets turning their hand to the prose poem. It is timely then to be reminded of the formidable oeuvre of our finest exponent of the form. The body of prose poetry Gary Catalano produced between 1980 and his death in 2002, now collected in a single volume for the first time, remains unsurpassed in our literature.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 y separately published work icon Purgatorio Re-placed Alex Selenitsch , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2021 23065951 2021 selected work poetry

'Purgatorio Re-placed is a re-write of Dante’s Purgatorio, the second book of his Divine Comedy. Using Dorothy Sayers’ translation as a guide, Alex Selenitsch keeps Dante’s overall and detail structure of 33 Cantos or chapters but rewrites the epic in modern Australian English. Dante’s medieval list of sins, his characters and events are replaced with Australian ones, while the mountain is flattened out to encompass the continent of Australia. Over this geography, the new poem deals with issues of art and creativity, and the development of a poetic voice.'

Source : publisher's blurb

1 1 y separately published work icon Ken Anthony Lawrence , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2021 20877461 2021 selected work poetry

'Each stanza of Anthony Lawrence's Ken gradually unveils, with a satirical and compassionate eye, a plastic doll's restricted identity. Ken, the occupant of engendered humanity, is observed in a series of adventures, transgressions, and unresolved intimate encounters. Delightfully humorous and intellectually credible with a melancholy edge, Ken is a book for our times.' (Publication summary)

1 y separately published work icon Typewriter Paul Hetherington , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2020 19764721 2020 collected work poetry 'The private matters of Hetherington’s Typewriter are thinly veiled behind an ever so gently crafted prose, causing the reader to walk in the poet’s shoes, and tripping over lines like ‘a diary from a shelf. It says she doesn’t love him’, evoking unwelcome memories.'
1 y separately published work icon Love's Philosophy S. K. Kelen , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2020 19764543 2020 collected work poetry

'It is impossible to understand how Kelen settled on the diverse subjects he has written on between the years 1978 to 2019. Regardless, the poems presented in Love’s Philosophy are given the same imaginative, romantic treatment—be it the great outdoors or a video game. Kelen’s vigorous style is much like his ‘Leech’— it goes for the jugular.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

1 y separately published work icon Leftovers Cassandra Atherton , Elizabeth Bay : Life Before Man , 2020 19764434 2020 collected work poetry

'Atherton’s treatment of the prose poem in Leftovers creates a synæsthesia-like experience. Her inventive regard of ordinary things triggers a breadth of sensations and memories, blurring in and out of her real world and her other ‘real’ world of literary fiction.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

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