These poems pulse with the language and images of a mangrove-lined river city, the beckoning highway, the just-glimpsed muse, the tug of childhood and restless ancestors. For the first time Samuel Wagan Watson's poetry has been collected into this stunning volume, which includes a final section of all new work.
Exhilarating road poems, urban songlines and ancestral ties are the hallmarks of this popular young poet. This collection contains poems from all of Watson's publications as well as his unpublished new work.
The much - anticipated new volume of poetry from the winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Book of the Year From acclaimed poet Samuel Wagan Watson comes a much - anticipated volume that is both wild and dynamic in its flair and vision, mapping the songlines - the poemlines - of an Australia scarred by invasion and injustice, but brimming, too, with the vital energies of creativity and resilience. With striking immediacy, Watson's often satirical take on contemporary Australia, with its acquisitiveness and materialism, bears witness to an ancient culture protesting against the implacable march of development. Honest, powerful and compelling, this new collection from one of Australia's most recognised Indigenous poets reveals the ways love might go wrong, but, equally, its transformative power to heal and resonate in unexpected ways. Love Poems and Death Threats breaks new ground for Indigenous Australian writing and adds to Samuel Wagan Watson's reputation as one of our most exciting poets.
A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.Home is a powerful and intelligent first novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.
With electrifying boldness, Holland-Batt confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father's Parkinson's Disease, and a daughter forged by grief. Opening and closing with startling elegies set in the charged moments before and after a death, and fearlessly probing the body's animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, The Jaguar is marked by Holland-Batt's lyric intensity and linguistic mastery, along with a stark new clarity of voice.Here, Holland-Batt is at her most exacting and uncompromising: these ferociously intelligent, insistent poems refuse to look away, and challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. The Jaguar is an indelible collection by a poet at the height of her powers.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! “Honest, timely, and completely thrilling.” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine book pick) “Part page-turning thriller, part smart examination of the #MeToo movement, part feminist rallying cry...Whisper Network is the satisfying “beach read” we’ve earned.” —The Daily Beast Sloane, Ardie, Grace, and Rosalita have worked at Truviv, Inc. for years. The sudden death of Truviv’s CEO means their boss, Ames, will likely take over the entire company. Each of the women has a different relationship with Ames, who has always been surrounded by whispers about how he treats women. Those whispers have been ignored, swept under the rug, hidden away by those in charge. But the world has changed, and the women are watching this promotion differently. This time, when they find out Ames is making an inappropriate move on a colleague, they aren’t willing to let it go. This time, they’ve decided enough is enough. Sloane and her colleagues’ decision to take a stand sets in motion a catastrophic shift in the office. Lies will be uncovered. Secrets will be exposed. And not everyone will survive. All of their lives—as women, colleagues, mothers, wives, friends, even adversaries—will change dramatically as a result. "If only you had listened to us,” they tell us on page one of Chandler Baker's Whisper Network, “none of this would have happened." “Exciting and sprinkled with razor-sharp insights about what it is to be a woman today, Whisper Network is a witty and timely story that will make you cheer for sisterhood.”—Liv Constantine, USA Today bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish
From the 2020 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Award comes a sophisticated, impressive and rich collection of poetry that unpacks the complexity of family, grief, and cross-cultural and queer identity. These richly allusive poems weigh violence and tenderness, wound and cure, history and future. Boldly and tenderly, they balance loss and gain, adventure and quiet, as they hum to one another of love and loss. This is a scintillating and exhilarating collection from an accomplished and distinctive new voice.
A timely and important collection of poems by the award-winning author of The White Girl and Blood. In this stunning collection Tony Birch invites the reader into a tender conversation with those he loves - and has loved - the most. He also challenges the past to speak up by interrogating the archive, including documents from his own family history, highlighting forcefully the ways in which the personal is also intensely political. Divided into three sections - Blood, Skin and Water - the poems in Whisper Songs address themes of loss (of people and place), the legacies of colonial history and violence, and the relationships between Country and memory. Whisper Songs reveals Birch at his lyrical and intimate best.