Cirrus@Austlit

'Little Bit Long Time, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first poetry collection, takes as its subject the difficult history of Indigenous people since colonial times. Both the four decades of her own often hard and confronting personal experience, and the lives of Indigenous people over the last two hundred years are the furnace in which the steel of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s incisive poetic voice has been tempered. Her language has the sureness of one who both knows her subject matter intimately and is able to speak authentically, having reached some sort of resolution in both life and in art.' (Source: EMSAH, University of Queensland website)

'This country anytime anywhere features writing from new and emerging Aboriginal writers from the length of the Northern Territory. This contemporary collection features eight Australian Aboriginal languages - some of them severely endangered - and is unsurpassed in its comprehensive representation of writers, subject matters and styles that share the powerful cultural, artistic, political and personal interests of these writers in the 21st century. Ranging from teenagers to elders, the writers come from diverse rural, urban and remote backgrounds...' (Source back cover)

'This new anthology of Australian and New Zealand poetry is remarkable for its exuberance, its vitality, and the notably youthful vibrancy of its free verse as well as its innovative prose poetry.  Including a wide range of voices from such well-known poets as John Kinsella, Pam Brown, and John Tranter to relative new-comers like Chris Tse and essa may ranapiri, The Language in my Tongue is full of surprises and special pleasures.

—Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English
 at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor
 of English Emerita at the University of Southern California

'Here are vernaculars. Here are modern-day classics. Here is a “mind in an unclear world,” “a space perfection will never survive.”  Here is invention permitted to travel the world, in dense prose poems and in chatty ones, in capable free verse and ghazals, “emissaries” and “a russet lock in an envelope.” Here Echnida meets the Spider, “making things transparent,” and here [is] bodily frailty and erotic love. Here, readers, are some highlights of the Antipodes, two—no, far more than two—poetic traditions, made available for you. Investigate. Drink deep.

—Stephanie Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University'  (Publication summary)

'This country anytime anywhere features writing from new and emerging Aboriginal writers from the length of the Northern Territory. This contemporary collection features eight Australian Aboriginal languages - some of them severely endangered - and is unsurpassed in its comprehensive representation of writers, subject matters and styles that share the powerful cultural, artistic, political and personal interests of these writers in the 21st century. Ranging from teenagers to elders, the writers come from diverse rural, urban and remote backgrounds...' (Source back cover)