Cirrus@Austlit

'Lena knew that the most tenuous of threads held everything together. At home she was known as the girl who lost things. Books, pens, wallets, her mother’s jewellery - the more precious the thing, the more likely she would lose it. She rifled through the pouch in from of her in search of her notebook. In New York she had learnt to take herself seriously, to believe that her thoughts and ideas mattered. I am no longer the person that I was, she incanted. I am different now. Coming home changes nothing.

'Two women, two lives, two paths. But are they so very different? In this poignant, dark, humane and funny novel, mother and daughter take turns opening old wounds and replaying old scripts, struggling with what can and cannot be said. Cusp is a novel about how small worlds are part of big worlds. It’s also about being a girl, about loving your mother, about life and death, and about not quite being there and almost being here.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (2018 ed.).

'Martin Harrison has been described as a writer whose poetry is a meeting place between the immensity, and intensity, of the Australian environment and the hi-tech world of everyday life. Collected here is the poet's own re-casting of his work since the early 1990s, setting accomplished poems from earlier books in the company of recent poems and prose poems. Martin Harrison's Wild Bees — New and Selected Poems marks a place of arrival and a new departure.' (Publication summary)