Cirrus@Austlit

'Riverbed Sky Songs is an admiration and imagining of the inherent links between ecosystems and the human experience. The poetry collection challenges colonial form and storytelling and is tenderly woven across the page to mirror Wae’s connection to Country; found in moments of enamour amidst soft pockets of moss at the edge of a riverbed, in the reminder of strength and of spirit as reflected in the surface of a pearl, to the ancestral songs and knowing that are passed on through blood. It is an ode to the legacy of labour, power, courage and love of writers before us, and an offering of an ember to our children who will keep the fires of care and culture burning. Riverbed Sky Songs is a transformative process of discovery that enacts as a reminder to return, to walk gently, and to listen with as great a depth as the seabed alongside which many of these poems were remembered and recalled.' (Publication summary)

'In this new collection by a seasoned master, Kim Cheng Boey moves between Singapore and Australia, youth and middle age â" places and times rendered in vivid, sensory detail â" to give a haunting exploration of memory and the emigrant experience: departures and arrivals; family and home; exile, longing and loss.'  (Publication summary)

''Dan Disney's accelerations & inertias is a remarkable work of self-critiquing, inverting hybridity. This is a restive book in which new skyscrapers and museums, temples and consumer fetishism are complementary, and not necessarily in tension. In these ‘distillations’ there is no quietism, and the ‘museum of the future’ is a question with fear and doubt in the air about it. The key to this work – the best of Disney’s, I think – remains the critique of a crisis of capital, a deep respect for environment, a deep respect for culture and its complexities, a wonder mixed with a toughness of observation and understanding of what being an observer means.'' (Publication summary)

'Throat is the explosive second poetry collection from award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. Exploring love, language and land, van Neerven flexes their distinctive muscles and shines alight on Australia’s unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart. Van Neerven is unsparing in the interrogation of colonial impulse, and fiercely loyal to telling the stories that make us who we are.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness represents a new departure in my writing. It is a single book-length poem made up of fragments and shorter pieces in varied styles that build towards the last line, which is the book's title. I have aimed at a sparse, open simplicity in this book, a clarity and brevity sufficient to carry the weight of the space I am now in, with my illnesses, my partner's cancer and the acute sense of time's limits. The poems question what it might mean to live and write in the immediate knowledge of death, what response we can find when out of the blue we, or the one we love, are told we have a very limited time, three or five years, to live. At the artistic as well as the personal level, there is also a need for balance in the work, as beauty, tenderness, the presence of the natural world, light as well as dark, insist on their place in the poem.'

Source: Author's blurb.