Cirrus@Austlit

'The Sun at Eight or Nine takes one back to the hinterland of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a time of tantrums, political or personal, with the story of a mother and her son that reaches a level of human misery as well as sublimity, rarely seen in this country.'

'A life in progress and told in fragments, CAPTCHA explores technology, mental health, and identity through the poems of and about a gynoid growing and becoming in her humanity. Investigating otherness and what it is to be woman, CAPTCHA plays with form, perspective, and technological themes to find the boundaries that define personhood in an age of developing AI and the increased invasion of robotics within and beyond the poetic world.'  (Publication summary)

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'The fashion industry is killing the planet but I really need that new designer handbag...Her daughter is divorcing and she's going to die because of it... The mother must be medicated... I just want to be in Cyprus, why would I want to be in Australia...She's never had an orgasm and still lives with her parents...Anything my boys want they get...He's got a whole bank of chicks on his phone... Ever since I came to this country I been in bed...If her children can get her the drug for the MND, until then she will dream of her village in Greece...Conquests are about scoring the chicks, but he's never going to turn out like his nonno...They never talked about what her uncle did again...The money made him go mad...My mummy is sad, she keeps talking about 'court and custody', but I'm going to take the potion and make everything better...

'Bestselling poet Koraly Dimitriadis's debut short-story collection features broken people trying to make their way back to hope.'  (Publication summary)

'Not Telling is a lyrical analysis of the possibilities and limitations of language. In three distinct sections it entwines notions of speech and silence with intolerable psychic matter such as intergenerational grief, loss and the lasting effects of cultural voicelessness. The personal intersects with the political in depictions of black mothers bearing the weight of colonisation, human relationships halting and failing and the complexities of dream interpretation. The poems disrupt time and linearity, weaving metaphor into Freudian, Irigarayan and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Not Telling illustrates the ongoing legacy of colonial dispossession and the strength of its survivors through representations of the wretched damage caused by the invasion of (Australia), as well as musings on sacred land and celebration of continued culture. It testiïfies to the systemic oppression of Aboriginal people, connecting present-day black trauma with its origins. Jolted by the life realities of who we were, and are, alongside exacting accounts of genocide, the reader is immersed in a rich and harrowing world. Not Telling sits at the nexus of the individual psyche and the human collective as a unique expression of the (Australian) experience.'  (Publication summary)

'There is an amusing asperity. And, for all its judgements, Metropole is rather forgiving. Irresistible, of course-and smart. - Arlo Banens, The Tune

'His work characterised by its 'degree zero' cool, Bolton would seem to have taken his American influences and refined them through an apparatus built of French cinema, nouveau roman, and contemporary art criticism: coolly conversational-but flexibly elastic-this work can contain multitudes. - Peter Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review

'Excellent. - Millie Dickins, Astrolabe

'Morose, counter-intuitive, something of a zany, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1952 Lancia Aurelia, 'Mandy', an image that belies the tales of later suffering - the affairs, the court appearances, the bad teeth - and speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness "where happiness happens to like its poems written best" (in his inordinate phrase).'  (Publication summary)

'With candour and grace, Leah Kaminsky focuses her physician's gaze with scalpel-like precision, as she probes the secrets of the body's terrain. Exploring the vulnerability of the human condition, she examines our fragile lives as we confront our own mortality - the weakness and the strength that emerge from the tumult of illness and decline, trauma and war. Kaminsky lowers her doctor's mask, using a deft poetic lens as she straddles the realms of science and the soul, shining light on the malady of illness. By checking her own emotional temperature, she foregrounds torment as well as resilience, creating a powerful and graceful elegy to both the living and the dead.'  (Publication summary)

'Alchemy of the Sun is a book about journeys. Sent to ‘open up the country’, ignorant of Aboriginal strategies for coping with the terrain and climate, many of the desert explorers failed, some dying in the attempt. Today’s battle is with man-made climate change and its aftereffects, an ongoing fecklessness that has disturbed the delicate balance of elements and environment.

'These poems seek to challenge the mindset of ‘conquering’ the land, and offer instead the opportunity of mediation with the forces that shape the planet and our lives.'  (Publication summary)

'Best of Australian Poems is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot and barometer of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry across a timeframe of 1 July 20231 August 2024, the series (now in its fourth year) explores how poetic responses to the contemporary moment develop with each passing year.

'The book opens with an introduction by its 2024 editors, multiple award-winning and highly respected poets and editors, Kate Lilley and Shastra Deo. Kate is one of the longest-standing poets of repute and respect in the country, with work considered ground-breaking and innovating over decades. Shastra's own major prizes include the prestigious, national Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and their poetry is also continually experimental and fearless.

'Previous editors of this prestigious series have been Ellen van Neerven and Toby Fitch (2021); Jeanine Leane and Judith Beveridge (2022); and Panda Wong and Gig Ryan (2023).'  (Publication summary)

'A Workingman's Cemetery unearths the contents of a small bone orchard in 41 short, fictional biographies. The histories of the interred, from a Hunter coalmining village now gone, are connected by the spectacularly unkempt life of Ronald Borthwick, the village gravedigger, who, over time, buried almost everyone he knew until, betrayed by a best mate in a village where solidarity is crucial, he was driven finally, murder-suicide. In the cemetery.'  (Publication summary)

'Justin Lowe's San Luis is a collection of veils, partly lifted or shifting in the breeze, providing glimpses of things perhaps not fully apprehended, of questions not answered.

'In poems that are wistful, nostalgic, remembrances, heartaches, Lowe probes a lifetime of the uncertainties of 'this crooked little boy / with his warped view of time, / of belonging, /that never got truly mended.' David Ades' (Publication summary)

'All That Remains explores our frailty in various forms physical, emotional, spiritual as we march onwards to the drumbeat of time. Some poems are reflections on quiet yet devastating moments of clarity, of the sort that mark turning points in our lives. Some are musings of an outsider staring at familiar surroundings in disbelief. Others are attempts to find meaning and fulfilment in the dreamscape of the modern world, while grappling with the question of what it takes to lead a good life. Drawing them all together is the author's conviction that language is music, that words have a meaning defined not only by dictionaries but also by their rhythm, melody and counterpoint.'  (Publication summary)

'The fashion industry is killing the planet but I really need that new designer handbag...Her daughter is divorcing and she's going to die because of it... The mother must be medicated... I just want to be in Cyprus, why would I want to be in Australia...She's never had an orgasm and still lives with her parents...Anything my boys want they get...He's got a whole bank of chicks on his phone... Ever since I came to this country I been in bed...If her children can get her the drug for the MND, until then she will dream of her village in Greece...Conquests are about scoring the chicks, but he's never going to turn out like his nonno...They never talked about what her uncle did again...The money made him go mad...My mummy is sad, she keeps talking about 'court and custody', but I'm going to take the potion and make everything better...

'Bestselling poet Koraly Dimitriadis's debut short-story collection features broken people trying to make their way back to hope.'  (Publication summary)

'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)

'A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre-World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne's latest contribution to the verse novel genre. Propelled at times (though never exclusively) by politics, there is of course plenty of room for satire, though the scope of the tales being told ranges from tragedy to tragicomedy to comedy to farce, with all the muses contributing. Given there are over one hundred characters in the cast, this is a book to be seen as a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia.'  (Publication summary)

'While visiting his ailing father in Sydney, the author discovers an old suitcase chucked out for a council clean-up. Curiosity gets the better of him and he opens it. Inside are hundreds of photographs, newspaper clippings and letters, all addressed to Mr Blank. And so the process of discovery begins: Who is Mr Blank? A maverick entrepreneur with the Midas touch, a convicted criminal with impeccable tastes, a publican and theatre impresario, a gap-toothed lover of beautiful women from all over the world. Mr Blank flew above the law and mainly below the radar of twentieth century Australia. And not everyone wants his past, or their part in it, to be revealed.' (Publication summary)