Cirrus@Austlit

'As I began reading Elfie Shiosaki’s Refugia, shocking reports were emerging from the Western Australian coronial inquest into the death of sixteen-year-old Cleveland Dodd in Unit 18, the youth wing of Casuarina Prison, a maximum security adult prison. Before I had finished the book, the news came through of the death of another Indigenous teenager in custody. Decades after the devastating report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, with its clear and urgent recommendations, little has been done to keep First Nations people out of custody and safe when in custody.' (Introduction)

'There are many reasons why I shouldn’t be here. If you’d shown my ten-year-old self my life as it is now, he’d have been stunned, mostly because he half-expected an early death. My father, who had Marfan Syndrome, the genetic condition I have, died when he was in his mid-40s, when I was two, and the conventional medical wisdom of the time was that this was normal, almost expected.' (Introduction)

'When your body-mind is in upheaval, or is deemed troublesome, how do you find a way forward? In the shadow of an ecological and social crisis, whose voices do we need to pay attention to? The poems, essays and artworks in this groundbreaking anthology answer both these questions at the same time. Written collaboratively and in conversation, they harness rage and grace to speak back to unhealthy, alienating systems and experiences. Both prophetic and celebratory, Raging Grace affirms disability and neurodivergence as unique sources of truth telling, and collaboration as a radical model for collective health.'  (Publication summary)

'In ancient Rome, a tintinnabulum was a wind chime placed outside a house or shop to ward off evil. The word is most often associated, however, with Arvo Pärt’s self-described compositional style, drawing on the minimalism in religious chants.'

'The compulsion to make lists is not purely of diagnostic interest to psychologists or the domain of scientists and accountants but also a potent and complex poetic mode. Song in the Grass, Kate Fagan’s first collection of poems in more than 10 years, brings lists, hymns, elegies and lyrics into an enlivening, idiosyncratic conversation.'  (Introduction)

'L.K. Holt’s sixth collection of poetry, Three Books, opens with Merry War (of never meeting and never ending), Holt’s liberal translations of 14th-century Persian poet Jahan Malek Khatun and of the first-century BCE Roman poet Catullus, presented contrapuntally on facing pages. The second book-within-a-book is Nina in the Hag Mask, an array of prose poems, sonnets, further translations and taut experimental lyrics. The third, April, is a single – and singular – long prose poem, tracing the meandering reflections of April and her friend June, interrupted by the “noisy data” of their experience and by Holt’s loose translations of excerpts from Anton Chekhov’s novella The Steppe.' (Introduction)

'About three-quarters through Acrobat Music: New & Selected Poems, Jill Jones nudges the reader knowingly in the ribs. ‘Difficult Poem’ proposes a list of possible definitions of what a ‘difficult poem’ might be, or might be assumed to be. Composed of only six lines, and nineteen words anagrammatically rearranged from its title, with an introductory subtitle, ‘(yeah like a’, it’s an ironic riposte to what has come back to Jones, as she told Jen Webb in a 2019 interview, ‘that my poetry is thought to be a bit “difficult”, for some reason I can’t quite figure out. Because it really isn’t difficult.’ Having read Acrobat Music, I wouldn’t disagree with her. And ‘Difficult Poem’ certainly hammers home the rousing, generative riffing of Jones’ approach.'  (Introduction)

'It’s no wonder Greek myths keep being modernised, when the times feel so consequential, riven with myriad disruptions caused by hubris and violation. Ekhō is the latest such retelling, a book-length poem in three sections by writer and artist Roslyn Orlando.' (Introduction)

'Π.O.’s two most recent books were epic in scope and heft. Fitzroy: The Biography was a sprawling history of the Melbourne suburb; Heide, a kaleidoscopic account of art-making and patronage. Both books wielded dizzying accumulations of disparate, sometimes incredible, facts and stories against monolithic authority.' (Introduction)   

'In the late 1980s, American nuclear-armed warships visit Perth, prompting impassioned protest from a wide array of people, including the narrator of John Kinsella’s verse novel Cellnight. After a brief prologue, they recall what they have seen and experienced. The waves of questions begin: “Who will / remember”. These rhetorical questions reverberate throughout the book and into the present.' (Publication summary)

'These days the line between dystopian and realist narratives feels increasingly blurred. The virtual world too now seems inseparable from the physical. The Exclusion Zone amply demonstrates that poetry is able to speak to these convergences.' (Introduction)

'The title of Lucy Dougan’s latest poetry collection quotes the surrealist artist Paul Nash, for whom the“monster field” is that “elusive and ubiquitous” place glimpsed in passing, which makes a profound impression but which cannot be easily found again.' (Publication summary)