Cirrus@Austlit

'A meditation on living in a post-religious world, this little book is packed with big ideas about doubt, faith and redemption for the ‘delicate formation of faults’ that runs through human nature.*

'Reading these droplets of insight about everyday life is a practice in mindfulness offering the opportunity to lift the veil and gaze at eternity.

'‘A mantra that will keep us in one piece’, as the poet Kim Cheng Boey writes, this book allows us to dwell in uncomfortable ideas.

'Prayers of a Secular World is a compendium of meditations from over eighty poets including the well-loved Cate Kennedy, Judith Beveridge, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Mark Tredinnick, award-winning poets such as Christine Paice, Lisa Jacobson, Debbi Hamilton and Lesley Lebkowicz.

'From their personal experience of our contemporary world, poets such as Ron Pretty, Robyn Rowland, David Brooks and many more have created a language of encounter that is universally resonant. Their blessings and epiphanies, insights and concerns, are the prayer that lives in all of us.' (Publication summary)

'In ‘they rise’ Jazz Money, a Wiradjuri poet and filmmaker addresses the future of the stolen lands we call Australia as a proud blak woman (Cordite, February 2021). Her voice rises above inferiority, trauma or shame. The poem is defiant, a wry celebration of the same bodies that colonialism makes ambivalent and abject by enabling its ‘superior’, cis-gendered whiteness:

turns out the future is technicolour blak black brown turns out we’re all welcome here queer brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings if you been here since the first sunrise or if you come here now just now come here heart open come here hurt from those wars and those sea levels rising

How do we turn out poetry that shows we are all welcome here? How do we collectively transpose settler privilege and oppressive hierarchies and why does it matter? What is wrong with a received system of naming, making categories and borders, if our hallowed aesthetics are tone deaf and mute to the sound of blak, brown and hybrid bodies breaking, dying, suffering? Listen to the poems here: we are suffering not merely because our tears matter less, or are less visible in the capitalist settler colony, but also because there are families that have been wartorn, assimilated and broken; there are forests that have been denuded, oceans pillaged and polluted, sacred sites mined, vestiges appropriated and rebranded, and all of this touches us multifariously, yet still, our protest is being silenced.' (Lucy Dougan Michelle Cahill Foreword introduction)