Cirrus@Austlit

'Fitzroy North 3068 explores Henry Holt's pulsating psycho-geographical R.M. Williams footprints from Western Arrernte (Hermannsburg) to Westminster with many stops in between. It is a wild and erotic ride.

'In Fitzroy North 3068 poet Yvette Henry Holt weaves a web of humour, confrontation, complaints, sex, childhood, livelihood, reflection, deferred intimacy, poetry, insecurity, truth, and emotional procrastination. This volume holds dialogue between a Jewish analyst and a geographically wayward east-coast blackfella travelling from Central Australia to Melbourne's inner city in order to figure out what it's all about. Fitzroy North 3068 is awash with humour that holds similar in input and outcome, and equally as dry as the proverbial bone.

'A collection of memories, temperament and Henry Holt's resolve to become neither patient nor client throughout her confessional sittings allows these poems to plunge cold hard and fast into the depths of a subconscious fortitude, all the while revealing follicles from life with humour, insecurity, Lutheranism and Jewish wit. It is a wild and erotic ride.'  (Publication summary)

'Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa knows a thing or two about telling a story. From her experience on stages and in front of live and television audiences, she now offers us her first book. Sukhjit reflects on her own experience as a Sikh-Australian woman, performing it against a backdrop of comfort and calamity: how we live our lives in a messy and multi-layered society.

'Using the staging of meals as her mode, Sukhjit explores presumptions and the nuances of all that we can bring to the table. She plays with the etiquette of what is carried into public arenas and what stays in our private worlds: our aspirations and heritage, and all our baggage.  

'There are no exclusionary zones for this courageous, passionate, irreverent, and very funny, writer'  (Publication summary)

'Through narrative and images, Geoffrey London recreates his early life moving away from the Jewish community of Perth and into fully fledged adulthood with a wry edge

'This is a story about a boy called Ray who, as a result of his greed and lust for life, became Jumbo both in size and in name. Ray was born into a Jewish family in Perth, Western Australia, shortly after World War II; a family living in a suburban house at a time of growing affluence and cultural change. The story follows Ray as his family relocates from the protective confines of the local Jewish community, as his own connections to the religion and to that community begin to falter.

'Ray is a loner by choice, a shrewd boy who knows how to create shortcuts to reduce his effort, and a watcher of life who fancies that he doesn't miss much. He does have both natural and learned attributes that will help him later in life, and others that will create hurdles for him.

'Told wistfully and with wry humour in a series of linked anecdotes, the story is one of a loss of faith, a discovery of selfhood, and one of adventures and misadventures, from boyhood to the beginning of an adult life. As his own life approaches its late stage, as a strategy for avoiding total erasure, this tale is an attempt to add aspects of Ray's humble life to that great ocean of experience and learning that fills bookshelves of libraries and provides witness to the process and struggles of being human.'  (Publication summary)

'What happens when who you are is different to who you imagined you’d be? 

'When her son was three, Brooke Boland was diagnosed with depression. She went back to find where it all started – the panic attacks, the dissociation – in the early days of motherhood. When she found it difficult to read or write. In this wide-ranging collection of essays Boland moves on from the person she was and writes to understand who she is now. She swims with sharks, falls in love with a rabbit, and watches her father fight for his life. She is a newcomer in a small regional town and a mother, but what else? She writes about family and friends, life and mortality, memory and forgetting, and along the way she finds her voice again. This book is for anyone who has felt unmoored. It is about the unremarkable in-between, the way we try to build a home from nothing, the dirty dishes and the loads of washing. The uncertainty and the love. But written in sparkling prose with a sly and wry tone that is illuminating about the everyday as it pitches for a rich and fulfilled life.' (Publication summary)

'A new contribution to literature that grapples with grief, death and the shape of what's left behind.

'Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.

'In 1993, when she was 18 years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North-East Victoria. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw these loved ones again. But also, never stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.

'What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure; a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, interleaving stories of what it means to lose the physical body of a person you love with a bricolage of literature, history and (vessel) translations, and the realisation that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests-elegies-inked on the skins of the dead.' (Publication summary)

'In Abbas El-Zein’s new memoir, conflicts abound – either tragic or amusing, sometimes both – between teachers and students, left- and right-wing factions, civilians and militiamen and, not least, French and Arabic, two languages vying for primacy in the post-colonial worlds of Beirut and the Levant, with English coming fast from behind. By the time he graduated from high school, El-Zein had nearly drowned in the Mediterranean, survived the breakout of civil war and lived through the violent death of two close family members. He witnessed Syrian and Israeli soldiers invade his country and, from his bedroom balcony, saw the mushroom cloud of the explosion that killed hundreds of American and French marines. But while war and tragedy struck every now and then, everyday life continued unabated, rich with humour, serendipity and love of many kinds. Bullet, Paper, Rock is a story of survival, and a meditation on desire and loss, language and violence. It is at once a requiem for a Levantine past gone sour – from the innocent 1970s, through September 11 and its aftermath, to the cataclysms of the Arab Spring and the Israel-Palestine conflict – and a tribute to women of his family – “weavers whose fabric of choice is hope, they were hard at work, at night as in daytime, carving out viable lives, ones in which they loved and were loved aplenty”.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A darkly humorous and groundbreaking memoir from a new voice in queer literature

'In Detachable Penis- A Queer Legal Saga, Elkin relates his bumpy journey from lesbian to transgender lawyer in the aftermath of the 2017 marriage equality postal survey.

'As the inaugural lawyer of Victoria's queer law service, Elkin is quickly immersed in thorny debates around trans inclusion in sport, children's access to puberty blockers, birth certificate law reform and the Christian right's demand for enhanced religious freedoms. Set against the backdrop of a growing moral panic about the 'trans agenda', Elkin reflects on the double-edged sword of visibility post the 'transgender tipping point'.

'Elkin offers an honest, unflinching account of chest surgery, phalloplasty, the emotional impact of cross-sex hormones and the perils of airport body scanners. Undogmatic and refreshingly open-minded, Elkin explores his ambivalence about aspects of his own transition, masculinity and fears of lesbian erasure as he encounters a new world of gender-affirming psychologists, surgeons and speech pathologists.

'Through an examination of Elkin's legal casework and law reform efforts, Detachable Penis offers a kaleidoscopic view of LGBTIQA+ communities living on the margins. This politically sharp narrative offers a nuanced account of the lateral violence, poor mental health and activist burn out that besets the contemporary LGBTIQA+ rights movement.

'Part love letter and part cautionary tale, Detachable Penis offers a darkly humorous glimpse into Elkin's unique life in the law that will undoubtedly spark many prickly conversations.' (Publication summary)

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'The first adaption of a complete Shakespeare play entirely in one Australian Aboriginal language, this books track the passionate project of language recovery and restoration into a highly successful mainstage production.

'The play Hecate is a landmark work in both theatre and language restoration. The Noongar language of the southwest of Western Australia is a critically endangered language impacted by settler-colonialism and suppressed until the 1970s. This book contains the complete play, a glossary, and chapters outlining the process of creating and then producing a play onto a professional stage with a Noongar cast working as both language learners and performers, where song became their catalyst to success.

'Premiering to critical acclaim in Perth Festival 2020, Hecate is a ground-breaking and audacious adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth in the Noongar language and from a Noongar perspective. The project in its early stages involved the development and presentation of Sonnets in Noongar, a selection of sonnets as part of the World Shakespeare Festival at the Globe Theatre in 2012 in London. The original cast remain poised to take Hecate to the UK and complete the circle.

'This dazzling project is brought to life in this short book designed to inspire language recovery and restoration in Australia, in a period when serious attention is being paid to many endangered languages. It demonstrates the power of performance to build community strength.' (Publication summary)

The final collection from the award-winning 'poet of the Hawkesbury River'

In the old days I used to think art

That was purely imagined could fly higher

Than anything real. Now I feel a small fluttering

Bird in my own pulse, a connection to the sky.

--from 'The Kingfisher's Soul'

'In the last year of his life, with the help of friend and poet Devin Johnston, Robert Adamson put together a selection of his writings on the natural world. Birds and Fish defines the presences in his life on the Hawkesbury River and includes excerpts from his autobiography, Inside Out, as well as essays written over the years for Fishing World; some prose poems; and journal excerpts related to his bowerbird Spinoza. Adamson's prose is vivid, precise, and draws on his life on the river and his poetic sensibility. The final book will include selected black and white photographs by Adamson's partner Juno Gemes. (Publication summary)

'I saved the pieces of you

when you fell apart

'Robert Adamson wrote that Robbie Coburn's poems "come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence". Largely set within stark farmland and surreal, nightmarish dreams, Coburn's new collection of poems, Ghost Poetry, is haunted by depression, trauma, addiction, memory, regret, and the spectre of mutilation and violence inflicted on the human body, accompanied by the desire to leave.

'But through this, there is always the process of the poet writing; an act that both dissects and preserves experience and suffering. This act ultimately creates, as Leonard Cohen wrote, an engine of survival.

'Always vulnerable, often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader' (Publication summary)

'In Fat Chance, poet and publisher Kent MacCarter investigates variations on how non-fiction can be reported, taking an uncanny look into sole survivors of major airline crashes, a memoir approach at the surgical complication known as gossypiboma – where an instrument is left behind in a body cavity after surgery – a recount of marketing tactics for children's toys and more.

'Columns of justified prose lure you into the familiar channels of reporting facts; you could be mistaken for believing there is no poet or poetry here at all. Yet, the primary purpose of Fat Chance is not the transmission of information, and it thrives on contradiction. Contrary to the title's colloquial meaning, it offers you ample possibility. Here, the journalistic and the poetic collide to liberate language from truth so you can wander in the wide, bountiful space between.

'Emotion is denuded from the stories, forcing you to fill the void with your own suppositions and terrors ... rubbernecking at yourself on why you are uncomfortably allured. With its irony and absurdity dialled up to the sublime, you will be confronted by this feel-bad book of the year.' (Publication summary)

'‘This is how I became interested in things. In their strange pull and power; in the ways they hold on to us and we to them.’

'After her father dies of cancer, Gemma Nisbet is inundated with keepsakes connected to his life by family and friends. As she becomes attuned to the ways certain items can evoke specific memories or moments, she begins to ask questions about the relationships between objects and people. Why is it so difficult to discard some artefacts and not others? Does the power exerted by precious things influence the ways we remember the past and perceive the future?

'As Nisbet considers her father’s life and begins to connect his experiences of mental illness with her own, she wonders whether hanging on to ‘stuff’ is ultimately a source of comfort or concern.

'Intimate and wide-ranging, The Things We Live With is a collection of essays about how we learn to live with the ‘things’ handed down in families which we carry throughout our lives: not only material objects, but also grief, memory, anxiety and depression. It’s about notions of home and restlessness, inheritance and belonging – and, above all, the ways we tell our stories to ourselves and other people.'

Source: Abstract.

'Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote? Abandon Every Hope is a lament, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age? Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profit-driven death. In her compelling and poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead; the smell of an egg factory; of multispecies PTSD; of planetary harm and self-harm: of the horror we make on earth. Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Meditations on parenthood, memory, death, the natural world, the fluctuations of pop culture, and the suburban grind with aplomb in a keen observational style

'Sam Morley's second collection comprises poetry that is image-rich, fusing the sublime with the common. Always committed to observation as a channel into discovery, You Do You merges meditations on parenthood, memory, death, the natural world and the fluctuations of pop culture and the suburban grind. The primary setting is the home, be it as a father or child or as a person perplexed by the vicissitudes of humanity. These poems start from the personal while remaining detached, and often undulate from the private world into something universal and large.' (Publication summary) 

(Publication summary)

'A violent and senseless crime committed against an innocent citizen, and a father's desire 25 years later to speak directly to others who have lost a child or experienced similar grief to help in the necessary recovery back into their lives.

'Ciara Glennon vanished into the night in Perth, Western Australia, leaving a family and a city in deep shock. When her body was found, nineteen days after her disappearance, even those with long memories could not remember a time when the community was as overwhelmed with sadness and anguish. A violent and senseless crime committed against an innocent citizen, the details and repercussions of Ciara's disappearance were unsettling.

'Ciara was murdered by the person the media labelled The Claremont Serial Killer. The search to find him spanned twenty-five years. Ciara's father, Denis, was a driving force in insisting that the killer be found and justice be delivered for his daughter.

'Such grief, in its woundedness and suffering, can deliver startling and shocking impacts on body, mind, heart and spirit. This is the story of Denis's journey and the pathways he found to arrive at a sense of peace and contentment after the loss of his daughter.

'Pastures of Healing is a raw, intimate, and uplifting story.' (Publication summary)

'Romance scams, pyramid schemes, bogus debts and fake news, the world is awash with confidence tricksters and swindlers. But what happens if the fraudster is your lover?

'It has been said that trust is a risk masquerading as a promise and, as Hemingway suggested, 'The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them'. Once we have fallen under the spell of malevolent hucksters, their power is real, as is the loss of self and hope when the spell breaks.

'A hybrid memoir and a personal detective story, Trust is an exploration of what it means to trust, why we trust, and what happens when trust is betrayed. With a particular view to fraud and corruption within the hallowed walls of sandstone universities, Ryckmans brings to light the oft subtle, brutal nature of control that fraudsters have over their victims, and shows the deep impacts their actions have on others personally and professionally. The cover up – sometimes said to be worse than the crime – has insidious effects.

'Trust is a fractured fable. It is darkly funny, wistful, and spare in tone and approach' (Publication summary)