Welcome to our newest newsletter, brimming with exciting poetry book releases!
Discover the latest and upcoming works from gifted poets across Australia. In this edition, we present a handpicked collection of fresh poetry books that will ignite your creativity and expand your poetry collection!
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The Infant Vine by Isabella G. Mead
Lyrical and narrative-driven with playful and fantastical elements woven throughout, the poems in The Infant Vine reflect on how ordinary moments become charged with significance and strangeness when disaster strikes. Such moments make imaginary worlds possible: sleep deprivation transfigures a new mother into a leafy seadragon; a novel virus gives women the power to reproduce via parthenogenesis like the eponymous bonnethead shark.
Themes of transformation, metamorphosis and preservation—of life, of memory and the environment—permeate Isabella G. Mead’s debut collection. This is a rich and compelling exploration on caregiving and creativity in the context of global crises.
More from UWA Publishing (UWAP)
Spirals, Collected Poems Volume Three (2014-2023) by John Kinsella
axolotl waltz by Nathan Shepherdson
In axolotl waltz, Nathan Shepherdson steers a rusty trolley with its wobbly wheel as he haunts the aisles in the Supermarket of Casual Koans (SOCK). What he can’t find, he invents, or at other times puts items back he bought months ago, on their same shelf, unopened. Shepherdson is perhaps an outlier in Australian Poetry – grows his own punctuation, turns water into accidental wit, stares at the seeds of random ideas with a synthetic light in his eyes. Yet he understands that shadows are the perfect fabric for a new suit or old clothes. It seems the shooting stars he’s looking for have blown their headlights.
Although he knows they are out there. There is a quiet darkness he weighs by the gram. He understands you need to throw the thing away in order to keep it. Earnestness is not a tune he can hold. Shepherdson has been known to patrol his own thoughts, half a full stop on his head. When he sees he’s in trouble he calls out to himself, dives in to save himself, then somehow manages to drag himself (plus the odd poem) back to shore. He lives in the constant reminder of his parent’s example, when as a child, they explained to him, “If you have a feather and a stone, you have an alphabet.”
More from Puncher & Wattman
Alchemy of the Sun by Margaret Bradstock
High Spirits by Paul Mitchell
Infantilisms by Louis Armand
I’ve been called away by Chester Graham
Weathered by Rachael Mead
Weathered explores the era in which we find ourselves – the Anthropocene – and how we are transforming the world on a cataclysmic scale. The climate emergency is altering our weather, landscapes and our connections to place. Covid-19 has upended our social systems and sense of security. Circling the intimate connections between place, memory and identity, these poems trace the psychological fallout of anthropogenic change to our ecologies and climactic patterns. Weathered weaves together the physical, emotional, and social landscapes transfigured by the Anthropocene and Covid-19 into a poetic history of memory and transformation.
More from Recent Work Press
Dublin Wandering by Nathanael O'Reilly
Equations of Breath by Lucy Alexander
Lover, Where Are Your Eyes? by Asha Naznin
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