Cirrus@Austlit

'A stunning new collection from one of Australia's finest poets - her most impressive work yet.

'With electrifying boldness and fearlessness of vision, Sarah Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father's Parkinson's Disease, and a daughter forged by grief.

'Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and compulsively probing the body's animal endurance and appetites, along with the metamorphoses of long illness, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt's distinctive lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.

'In this collection Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising- these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is a devastating and mesmerising collection by a poet at the height of her powers.' (Publication summary)

'Spanning poems written in the United States, Central America, Europe and Australia, The Hazards is a dazzling and inventive new collection from award-winning poet Sarah Holland-Batt. Opening with a vision of a leveret's agonizing death by Myxomatosis and closing with a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, Holland-Batt reflects a predatory world rife with hazards both real and imagined. Her cosmopolitan poems careen through diverse geographical territory - from haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua, the still Danish interiors of Hammershoi and the serial killer stalking Long Island Sound - and engage everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure and extinction. Charged with Holland-Batt's mercurial imagination and swift lyricism, this unsettling and darkly intelligent collection inhabits an uncertain world with a questioning eye and clear mind, unafraid to veer 'straight into turbulence'.' (Publication summary)