Cirrus@Austlit

'At fourteen Sophie Kamler crossed the Atlantic alone, from Poland to America. At sixteen she paid for her siblings and mother to follow. At eighteen, a penniless wife, then a mother of three, she defied New York gangsters.

'At fifty six, a widow, she married again only to be widowed a second time. Matriarch to a sprawling but tightly held family of descendants, hers is a story of ambition - of love given, withheld, slighted, sustained and disappointed.

'Told here by her granddaughter, Barbara Kamler, in riveting vignettes, photographs and poetic reflections, this tale will resonate with the experience of so many remarkable women, minimising the complexity and vibrancy of their lives.'  (Publication summary)

'Love, regardless—the second collection from Melbourne-based Barbara Kamler—is an enthralling gallery of poetic portraits celebrating love that endures. It features a unique, dialogic mode of storytelling, whereby interviews with fourteen couples are poetically crafted into rhythmic, syllabic verse. Each couple, each poem explores the intimacy of first connecting and the various complications negotiated along the way—crushing pressures of sexual or racial norms, the challenge of chronic illness or disparate histories, and the demands of extended family and geographic distance. Yet these are sanguine stories that transcend the trials of the everyday, making real the possibility of mutual love and joy over a lifetime.

'The characters in this volume are actual people, who live and love, and the events they impart really happen. However, it is Kamler’s deft hand that lifts and transfigures these experiences into poetry which moves the reader. Love, regardless is a beautiful and provocative collection that sings with the vitality of the spoken word. It is a tapestry of journeys as couples thread the past to the present—recounting the passion and pathos of long love—and the ways they move forward, together, regardless.'  (Publication summary)

'This collection recounts the story of leaving America, where the author was born, and of arriving in Australia, where she did not plan to stay. It is a tale of unsettling and resettling, of leaving as an ongoing process. Each micro-scene is a snapshot of time and place – spanning decades and moments, continents and conversations, wars, dreams and kitchen tables – to capture the psychological and spatial tensions between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Leaving New Jersey is a lyrical re-experiencing of putting down roots and tearing them up, an extraordinary poetic account of an ordinary woman's quest for home.' (Publication summary)