Cirrus@Austlit

'A fine-tuned book-length assemblage of dispersed ‘cerebral offcuts’, virtuosically inventing ‘the shape of a mood’. Nimble and light, precise and seemingly casual: ‘following some line’ of ‘live consciousness’, ‘inner in outer’, ‘what’s around’. Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax. Condensed, sharp pops of resonant fragments create their own fresh textures and juxtapositions.

'The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2021 judges (Kate Lilley, Pam Brown and Melinda Bufton) praised Running Time as 'nimble and light, precise and seemingly casual ... Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax.' (Publication summary)

'Knocks is the debut collection from one of the most exacting writers of Australian poetry’s new wave. Stewart’s poetry consistently surprises in its formal range, encompassing sonnets, erasures and found poetry, and striking at the level of the image –“the computer ecstasy of first-person”. The collection conveys the sense of an extended, “stretched” present, politically shadowed, where “it is commendable / to sign up each day, but better / to maintain a patina of disobedient / actions, shoplifting or whatever”.' (Source: Publisher's website)