Giramondo Publishing Giramondo Publishing i(A59354 works by) (Organisation) assertion (a.k.a. Giramondo Publishing Company)
Born: Established: 1995 ;
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1 4 y separately published work icon Heat no. 6 (New Series) Newcastle : Giramondo Publishing , Z1082891 2003 periodical issue
1 y separately published work icon In Your Dreams Šime Knežević , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2025 29168949 2025 selected work poetry

'Poetry which sings with its silences.

'As its title suggests, Šime Knežević’s first book-length poetry collection gestures towards the elusive and often fragmented reality of dreams and recollections. The poems speak of distance, dislocation and longing, evoked by the poet's cultural ties to Croatia, the awkwardness of personal relations and the discomforts of language. They also convey the embarrassment and regret which spring from daily encounters, especially when the point of view is that of an adolescent, a lover, a rival, indeed a poet, endowed with a more than usual amount of self-consciousness. These concerns are echoed, and heightened, by the elliptical form of the poems and their surreal dislocations, which invite the play of implication, giving space and silence their own kind of eloquence. The effect is remarkable, both for the range of emotions expressed, which includes humour and joy alongside unease and uncertainty, and for the intensity of their expression.'  (Publication summary)
1 25 y separately published work icon Alone : A Novel Beverley Farmer , Carlton : Sisters Publishing , 1980 Z307392 1980 single work novel

The narrator sets out her passionate obsession with her ex-lover, Catherine.
1 y separately published work icon The Prodigal Suneeta Peres da Costa , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 28763564 2024 selected work poetry

'A debut poetry collection by the acclaimed writer Suneeta Peres da Costa, author of the Prime Minister's Literary Award-shortlisted novel Saudade.

'In the title poem of Suneeta Peres da Costa's debut poetry collection, The Prodigal, the protagonist wakes to an imprint of tulsi beads marking her cheek where she slept, 'writing their faint, inscrutable calligraphy'. The poem recalling Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin and Derek Walcott invokes the collection's landscape of peripatetic and displaced being, traversed by themes of Goan and Indian history, diasporic identity, family and friendship, grief and illness, art and life. The book unravels myths of homecoming and return, belonging and displacement, patrimony and sovereignty; the poems' speakers feel both at home and also far from home. Best known for her work as a novelist, Peres da Costa expands upon the range of voices in her fiction, conjuring dramatic personae from Indian history and allegories from suburban Sydney, exploring lyric, narrative and essayistic modes. The collection reflects on artworks and objects: miniature Mughal watercolours and photographs of cockatoos; a tamarillo, a panettone. Passionfruit vines are disentangled; a street cobbler repairs the strap of a bag. Marked by its attention to the body, its strengths and infirmities, Peres da Costa explores the experience of suffering through earthly and human ecologies and primordial connections.'  (Publication summary)
1 4 y separately published work icon Chinese Postman Brian Castro , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 28550814 2024 single work novel

'Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In The Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine. As the correspondence opens him to others, the elaboration of his memories tempers his melancholy with a playful enjoyment in the richness of language, and a renewed appreciation of the small events in nature. This understanding of the experience of old age is something new and important in our literature. As Quin comments, ‘In Australia, the old made way for the young. It guaranteed a juvenile legacy.’' (Publication summary)
1 2 y separately published work icon Rock Flight Hasib Hourani , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 28347565 2024 selected work poetry

'A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

'rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative, to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.'  (Publication summary)
1 2 y separately published work icon John Berger and Me Nikos Papastergiadis , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 28241352 2024 single work autobiography

'The memoir of a deep friendship between two important intellectual figures bound by their interest in art and their experience of migration.

'In John Berger and Me, the eminent Australian sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis recalls his relationship with the late English writer and art critic John Berger. His memoir is both a portrait of their friendship, and an account of the work of his former mentor, one which combines Berger’s abiding interest in migrants and migration, with Papastergiadis’ reflections on his own family’s experience of migration. Berger was a successful author and artist who lived in England before he moved to a peasant village in the Haute-Savoie. Papastergiadias’ father was born in a peasant village in Greece and migrated to work in factories in Australia. The memoir covers a period of ten years in the 1990s when the younger Nikos spent many summer months with the distinguished author, living in the family house and sharing duties such as the gathering of the harvest. It draws on personal memories, his deep knowledge of Berger’s work, which was the subject of his doctoral thesis, and anecdotes of life in the village, and beyond. The intertwining of their common experiences means that the book is both a biography and an autobiography, as well as a tribute to one of the most significant cultural thinkers of recent times.' (Publication summary)
1 5 y separately published work icon Tintinnabulum Judith Beveridge , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 28052315 2024 selected work poetry

'Judith Beveridge’s much-anticipated new collection of poems, the first since her prize-winning new and selected, Sun Music, in 2018.

'The poems in Tintinnabulum focus on animals, people, and places, though you could say that the real subject matter is the power of poetry, since the book explores how metaphor, simile, imagery and sound can reveal connections that are imaginative, revelatory and sometimes threatening. Beveridge’s creative use of language is most evident in the section of the book titled ‘Bizarre Bazaar’ ― where she plays on lines and titles by Wallace Stevens (a fitting companion), and offers linguistic elaborations on familiar objects, and strange beliefs and customs. Each detail leads to others through association, there is multiplicity everywhere, and movement and energy, and this is as true of the poems which capture the particular features of animals, the transient effects of landscape, or the memories of people and places, as it is of the language-oriented poems.

'There is a range of styles, lyrical, dramatic and narrative, which build on the achievements of poems in Beveridge’s previous collections. There is also an emotional range to the poems: some poems are joyous, celebratory, ecstatic ― others humorous, elegiac, nostalgic ― but the overall feeling is of the joy and richness of language.' (Publication summary)
1 2 y separately published work icon Song in the Grass Kate Fagan , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 27819593 2024 selected work poetry

'Song in the Grass is Kate Fagan’s most personal collection to date. Each of its five sequences moves out in a widening circle from where the poet is standing in life. The collection is an almanac of significant changes; in particular, new lives begun in the Blue Mountains during a transfiguring time of parenthood, against a backdrop of climate uncertainty.

'A precise language of environmental observation is braided into stories of family and kin networks. Careful descriptions of place anchor this collection in ecological watchfulness. Birds are sentinel to environmental change, and symbols of spiritual transformation. Song in the Grass includes over sixty different species of endemic or migratory Australian birds.

'Archival practices of all kinds ― what one poem describes as 'a lyrical index' ― offer touchstones for this sonically rich collection, in which poetry becomes a way of sustaining love over distance, a collective music, and a compass for navigating in-common emergencies.' (Publication summary)
1 3 y separately published work icon Naag Mountain Manisha Anjali , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 27469247 2024 selected work poetry

'Naag Mountain is a journey across oceans, from the Asian subcontinent to the South Seas, a journey about human trafficking on sugar plantations in Fiji and Australia, which brings to life the histories and events, the stories and myths of a displaced and exploited people, that have been lost in time or forgotten or hidden from view. It is a journey in which the living, the dead and the natural world communicate in music, language and dream.

'Manisha Anjali’s first collection is an intensely imagined recovery of a little-known cultural inheritance, in which historical figures, folk characters and mythical entities feature in a procession coloured by the metaphors of poetry and the surrealism of dreams. A community in northern Queensland, whose ancestors were indentured by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, receive messages from their friends across the Tasman. A mysterious reel of film washes ashore, depicting harrowing violence on sugarcane plantations under the indenture system. The actors walk out of the film and into the world of the living. The community walk into the projection.' (Publication summary)
1 3 y separately published work icon Television Kate Middleton , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 27133625 2024 selected work poetry

'A poetry collection which is part criticism, part autobiography, and always acute in its recollection of the emotions inspired by television drama

'In her new collection Television, award-winning poet Kate Middleton considers the emotional impact that television programs had on her formative years ― from childhood cartoons Astro Boy and Roadrunner to series like Pretty Little Liars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills 90210. These were ‘the shows I watched to cry, to feel/ the hot gash angst of teenaged-ness’. In poems that expand like mini-essays, the poet explores the feelings evoked by these shows, the shame and longing, the regret and desire, and the different kinds of identification they encouraged, especially in a teenage girl. But the focus is also on the poet as an adult, thinking back over her adolescent responses, about the ways in which television plays with time and reality, and the extent to which its jumble of images reflects her own multi-faceted consciousness, if it hasn’t in fact formed it ― ‘the one whose interests are too voluminous, the one who tries/ to write deeply into one idea and is instead immediately/ tugged sideways…I try to do too much and/ my attention shatters, ricochets among ruins’.' 
1 3 y separately published work icon Monument Bonny Cassidy , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 26663839 2024 selected work poetry prose 'An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. Monument is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past - part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation - it traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of a White Australian family of mixed origins and ancestries. Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Cassidy makes a case for the value of 'collected memory' against the tide of settlement and silence. Inspired by the methods of Natalie Harkin's archival poetics and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre, Cassidy's Monument considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?' (Publication summary) 
1 3 y separately published work icon Critic Swallows Book : Ten Years of the Sydney Review of Books Catriona Menzies-Pike (editor), Penrith : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26646690 2023 anthology review essay

'In 2023 the Sydney Review of Books celebrates a decade online and the publication of more than a thousand essays and longform reviews of Australian and international literature. Over these ten years the SRB has cleared a unique space for serious reflection on literature and for critical thinking about our culture more broadly. The journal has been shaped by the diverse aesthetic, political and critical dispositions of our contributors, each of whom has different questions to ask contemporary literature. As they’ve asked these questions, they’ve guided a bold and independent public conversation about literature, and especially about the many forms of Australian literature.

'Critic Swallows Book brings together twenty-two essays that together demonstrate the eclecticism of the Sydney Review of Books. It includes essays on decolonising Australian literature and revisiting the classics, on blockbuster fiction and book-length poetry, on modernism in the Antipodes and reading during the pandemic. Essays on Susan Sontag and Rita Felski sit alongside critical considerations of Murray Bail and Joan London, of Evelyn Araluen and Samia Khatun.

'Contributors: Timmah Ball, Paola Balla, Alix Beeston, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Andrew Brooks, Bonny Cassidy, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Tom Clark, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ben Etherington, Ross Gibson, Ivor Indyk, Yumna Kassab, Louis Klee, Jeanine Leane, James Ley, Catriona Menzies-Pike, Drusilla Modjeska, Alys Moody, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Oliver Reeson.' (Publication summary)
1 2 y separately published work icon Paradise Estate Max Easton , Penrith : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26506932 2023 single work novel

'It’s 2022 and Helen is starting again. Newly single, adrift in a hostile rental market, she finds a four-bedroom house flanked by apartment blocks that stare into the yard. Despite the lack of privacy, she fills its rooms with an unlikely group of residents looking for communal belonging: a zine maker working on a punk music archive; an activist writing about Australian anti-communism; a research scientist striving to put down roots; and a part-time rugby league player who has one chance to play for his country before retirement. Each is looking to build a future, each is haunted by their recent past.' (Publication summary)
1 1 y separately published work icon The Cyprian Amy Crutchfield , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26363908 2023 selected work poetry

'Powerful debut which interrogates the nature of love in its various forms

'From poems of desire and sexual longing to poems of love in the face of death, The Cyprian explores the joy and heartbreak love weaves into our lives. The collection confronts some of our primary questions about love: how is it possible to accept the death of the beloved? What role does deception play in love? When does love become a force of exploitation? The collection is composed of five parts, reflecting the different aspects of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty — a complexity which is also implicit in the ambiguity of the book’s title, ‘the Cyprian’.

'Crutchfield trained as a classicist, and her poetry combines conversational idioms with mythic visions of human relationship, ‘longing and its/ fierce metamorphosis’. Elegies, love poems and imagistic snapshots mix with wide open epistolary verse. Her poetry reclaims the linguistic power and range of allusion found in late romantic poets like Christopher Brennan and Francis Webb, bringing them to bear on contemporary female experience.' (Publication summary)
1 2 y separately published work icon The Idealist Nicholas Jose , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26363856 2023 single work novel 'Set in Australia, East Timor and Washington in the lead up to the independence referendum in East Timor in 1999, The Idealist is a novel which explores the entanglement of private and public life. It is a political mystery, the portrait of a marriage, a reflection on friendship, and a study of a personality as it breaks down under pressure. Jake, an Australian defence analyst, is torn between his support for the people of East Timor, whose commitment to independence in the face of mounting violence, he has experienced personally, and his sense of responsibility for, and complicity in, the actions of his government. When he is found dead in the garage of his Washington home, after passing secret intelligence to his American counterpart, his wife Anne wants justice. The narrative is told from changing perspectives, moving through time and memory, in search of what really happened. It is a story, above all, about the formation, necessity and human cost of idealism.' 

(Publication summary)
1 y separately published work icon Golden Repair Louise Carter , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26220148 2023 selected work poetry 'The poems in this collection draw upon the sounds, colours and quirks of urban and suburban Australia. Personal perceptions and associations are interwoven with snippets of speech, soundbites from TV shows, the percussive rhythm of highways and tramlines, and the atmospheric permutations of a climate in flux. Infused with a romantic sensibility, the poems dramatise the ways in which relationships are played out in ordinary circumstances, on balconies, backyards, streets and against skylines. As the poet exclaims, ‘Oh Lord of Chlorine, Gear Sticks,/ Forklifts and Cream Cheese, forgive my short attention span./ Grant me a chance to find enchantment in ordinary things.’ At the heart of the collection the extended sequence of poems ‘Golden Repair’ portrays the intoxicating highs of love and the darker emotions that come with its loss — the anger, there criminations, the loneliness.' (Publication summary) 
1 5 y separately published work icon The Tour TT. O , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26220009 2023 single work novel 'This book-length verse narrative is about a so-called ‘Dirty T-Shirt Tour’, on which a group of Australian poets travel to cities in the United States and Canada in the mid-1980s,to give readings. It is composed as a diary, written from the point of view of one of the poets, who finds himself at odds with the others by virtue of his migrant background, and his commitment to ‘performance’ poetry. It is his first visit to America, which he views with both wonder and alarm. Isolated in the group by his commitment to a poetics of ‘utterance’, he finds friendship and acclamation in his audiences and the people he encounters on the street. The tensions portrayed extend beyond the group to encompass issues of racism, sexism and class, as the book offers snapshots of American society, as viewed by the outsider, which are in themselves an expression of his performance poetic. The Tour stands as a chronicle of thed ifficulties and triumphs of performance poetry, of which Pi.O. was one of the pioneers, long before it became the popular form it is today,' (Publication summary) 
1 1 y separately published work icon In the Photograph Luke Beesley , Yarraville : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26023484 2023 selected work poetry

'The poems in In the Photograph unfold in domestic and suburban settings. They capture the exact moment of writing: how, from it, possibilities branch out into observation, memory, word play, analogy, fantasy, other artworks and other art forms. Cinema, photography, theatre, painting and music all move freely in and out of the poem’s frame.

'The writing revels in humour and narrative surprise: twists in syntax, jump cuts in time, jump cuts from one category of experience into another. In the Photograph is intimate, familial, often moving; it is also sparklingly clever and alert to the imaginative possibilities that can open out from the minutiae of days.' (Publication summary) 
1 5 y separately published work icon Chinese Fish Grace Yee , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2023 26023166 2023 single work novel

'A family saga narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, Chinese Fish offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a ‘yellow peril’ menace and an exotic ‘model minority’.'(Publication summary)
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