'Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington offer us this anthology of 160 prose poems by 149 Australian poets, including Bruce Dawe, Bruce Beaver, John Blight, Vincent Buckley, Michael Dransfield, John Forbes, Rae Desmond Jones, Rudi Kraussman, Tatjana Lukic, Vicki Vidiikas and the late Ania Walwicz.' (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)
'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 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)
'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)
