Cirrus@Austlit

'After my parents’ dinner parties, I’d pour dregs from wine bottles into saucers for the fairies – white wine for the good ones, red for the wicked. The red always disappeared faster, which I took as proof that naughty people have more fun. I didn’t really believe that fairies drank the wine but equally, I didn’t not believe either.

'As a parent, I am tuning back to that curious magic of childhood; the naive ambivalence that accepts the existence of tooth fairies and flying reindeer; the unadulterated wonder at new things; the unexpected grace of an ibis in flight; the dinosaur shriek of a sulphurcrested cockatoo; the shocking weirdness of a Gymea lily in bloom; the otherworldly-warble of currawongs as dusk settles in.

'Yet, as wonder flows back into my daily life, so too does the creeping realisation that we are living in a time of overlapping and escalating environmental crises. What stories will prepare my son for a future that frightens me? For me, there is no overarching narrative or truth, no heroic figure who will lead us to salvation from this mess we are in. Instead, sense is made from paying attention to the assemblages of people and other animals who we move among on a damaged planet. I read and write and draw to make sense of a world I no longer recognise.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In a j carruthers’s new collection, verse stanzas, running vertically from top to bottom rather than left to right, challenge the dominant linear mode of thinking and writing in the West. They call attention to alternative forms of representation and reveal the existence of other landscapes. The purpose of the ‘axis’ is no longer confined to one-way movement, but to rotation and circular modes of thinking, writing, and generating new ideas.' (Introduction)

'What characterises Dan Hogan’s poetry is the way that, each time we come close to fully apprehending the impending collapse of capitalism, we are waylaid by something more urgent and mundane: groceries, emails, calls to Centrelink, traffic jams on the way home from work. When the present is frantic, frenetic and demands our full attention, it becomes the only thing that is real. The tragedy with which we live, in Hogan’s words, is that we resultantly have ‘no time to grieve for lost futures’.'(Introduction)

(Introduction)

'A visual essay about encounters with nature, as a parent during a pandemic. Part of an ongoing series of research through design experiments in which I explore ways that narrative nonfiction nature writing could include visual storytelling elements that are integrated, rather than illustrative.'

Source: OPUS (Open Publications of UTS Scholars). (Sighted: 9/8/2023)

'When Teena McCarthy told me she had constructed this book from poems, lines, phrases and images that she had written on odd-sized pieces of paper and had gathered them until they formed a manuscript, I immediately thought of Emily Dickinson, who also wrote many of her poems on the backs of envelopes and scraps that had been used as shopping lists. The connection is not far-fetched: McCarthy connects startling images to form intense visions that vibrate with arresting music.' (Introduction)

'Read. This is poetry. Both a praise and a lament for Country. Read. There is little like it. Australia struggles with an embrace of the past, but Louise Crisp does not flinch from the intimacy of fact. If there is regret here, there is also hope – hope and a plea to you, reader, to witness the works of those for whom the land is not their mother.' (Introduction)

'The book of days is an illustrated anthology from the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival. It contains contributions from festival contributions from festival presenters as well as responses from the audience. The book is a memento of the festival experience, a record of what was presented and also how it was received. Writers and readers, together.' (Publication summary)