Emily Crocker complicates home and family in her debut poetry collection, Girls and Buoyant. With sensitivity and wry observation, Crocker explores old suburbs and new losses at the intersection of late capitalism and queer love.

Second edition with a new cover. Perfect bound. 62 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147527 

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blur by the is a collection of fractures that make not quite a whole. It is a giving of permission to the self, to exist as messily as ( i s ). These poems are a record of navigation through longing and dis [ place ] ment of the body and of place, a shattering of expectation(s) of the self and of family, often through dreams, food and eroticism. blur by the is a yearning for freedom from grief, memory, and—ultimately—from definition.

‘Cham’s practice is closer to that of Solange. Like Solange, Cham combines ‘deep joy mediocrity’ – affection for the quotidian, that empathy and cognitive recognition demanded by poetry – with ‘full time tenderness’. They are a gracious host (offering up the good cutlery, the nice bowls at the back of the cupboard), and are consistently and amply solicitous of the reader.’ - Declan Fry (Cordite Poetry Review)

💥 Judges for the 2020 Mary Gilmore Award wrote:

‘Cham Zhi Yi’s playful and intense poems deftly unpick the sometimes-rich, sometimes-fraught relationship between place and identity, history and the contemporary, family and self. Concerned with a Malaysian past and an Australian present, blur by the engages a variety of moods and forms, from the satirical and demotic to the lyrical and redacted. The collection’s multilingual status underscores the profound imbrication between language and experience. Its interest in form and typography is pronounced, further drawing attention to a poetics that is attuned to the material nature of language, just as it is aware of the cultural politics of any language act. In this impressive debut collection, the everyday becomes a profound source of (dis)connection and linguistic play.’

Awards:

💥 Winner: 2020 Anne Elder Award. Read more >

💥 Shortlisted: 2020 Small Press Network Book of the Year Award. Read more at ArtsHub and on the SPN website >

💥 Shortlisted: 2020 Mary Gilmore Award. Read more >

💥 Shortlisted: 2020 ACT Writing & Publishing Award. Read more >

Read an excerpt >

Read a review by Declan Fry for Cordite >

Read a review by Shastra Deo for Overland >

Read an interview with the author >

First edition. Perfect bound. 95 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147541

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HAUNT (THE KOOLIE) is experimental poetry about growing up bi-cultural; a neo-Coolie meditation, exorcism of racial bigotry and satire of fear-mongering, from a decolonial Mauritian-Australian perspective.

Mauritian culture is too often known in the West for the dodo: an extinct, flightless bird who inhabited the island and died out during European colonisation.

Suburban mainstream yachts grow, giant

weeds in driveways, outlaw

gutter trophies, never seem to

Like! Find water?

But: I am Black enough to hold

the Whiteness in me

on me and @-me, account without counting

a graceless film-fade into seething light

hide colour, enlighten or die

settling, whiny-rewind VHS scores

(At Aussie, we’ll save you!)

First edition. Book. Perfect bound. 74 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147596

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“Jennifer Nguyen’s collection, When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon, is a haven for lonely souls, insomniacs, the abandoned and the forgotten. It is both blanket fort and paper boat. I want to curl up within her words, like a cat. Jen’s poems remind me to pay attention, to be gentle to myself and to others. Self-deprecating, funny and sincere, they retain a childlike awe.” - Shu-Ling Chua, Australian Poetry Journal

'Poetry is / can / be anything … everything,' says When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon. She is sleepy, but they cannot sleep. It is 4:44 a.m. loneliness, this restlessness. The soft hue of blue from the TV bathes the room via a 24/7 lo-fi livestream. ‘Poems are troubled into existence’ – When I die, she read that somewhere, but cannot remember where, but it has stayed, it is the underpinning of this book and all that contains with/in/out. Where did these bruises come from? The heart, the brain, the heart, the soul? How do I live? How do I keep on living? I don’t know, is the honest answer. I must, is the honest honest answer.

Read a review by Darlene Silva Soberano over at Cordite >

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First edition. Perfect bound. 78 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147565

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The Naming by Aisyah Shah Idil is full of surprises as this remarkable debut collection pulls apart the threads of liminality and traces their paths across culture, family, and environment. Shah Idil’s experimental sense provides a transformative frame for an uncompromising lyricism, pushing outwards beyond the pages and prodding at the edges of memory and oblivion. Shah Idil’s poetry is magical and relentless, brimming with love.

Second edition with a new cover. Perfect bound. 52 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147503 

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A wheeze is the sound air makes when it hits the constricted trachea, the sound of meat meeting air. wheeze is a collection of poems about the ghostly possession of the body. It's desire as a force and not a lack. It's Pazuzu from The Exorcist. It's compulsive journalling. It's the reading someone else's body language as a gothic form of divination. It's the dark art of crushing, when the consuming thought of that distant other person enters you through the windpipe like a second body.

On twitter

twink Lucifer

sits forlorn.

First edition. Perfect bound. 64 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147558 

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The poems in The Hostage explore the give and take of desire, being taken by language, art, or a higher-power, and the curious drift of experience.

The hostage rarely threatens 

the silence too, so as far as I can tell this is a good hostage, I say 

‘you’re a really good hostage.’ 

First edition. Book. Perfect bound. 64 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147572 

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If you're sexy and you know it slap your hams is a darkly funny, irreverently angry, and stupidly erotic contemplation of what it means to be a person, especially a sexy person, especially a sexy fat person, with supple, slappable hams.

This is a good book for bad people, no judgement. A good book of poems for people who like a procession of dogs’ dicks, bodily fluids, naked old ladies, groundhogs, asses, nose picking, depression and bisexual innuendo. A poetry collection like nothing else but actually like a lot of other things. Pushing the sad into the funny and back into the sad again, this book provides a portrait of a young human coping with a cruel and indifferent universe, love, life, mental illness, celebrity culture; and smizing all the way down. This poetry collection is a fat wet tongue writhing with pleasure and agony in the mouth of a culture overflowing with bad behaviour, worse intentions and even worse, smellier saliva. This book is like chicken soup for the soul, except someone misheard and they used chicken poop instead. And now they have chicken poop instead of a soul. Eloise Grills tears her time-space continuum a new one, slapping our sumptuous hams over and over; so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the arse.

💥 Shortlisted for the 2020 Mary Gilmore Award, the judges wrote:

‘Eloise Grill’s If you're sexy and you know it slap your hams is an irreverent and funny/sad/angry textual performance tracking through the cruel or simply ridiculous complications of modern life – sex, mental illness, daily drudge, body image, social media feels. Grills mines the cultural moment including its pop cultural artefacts and its waste products (and bad smells) with avidity, even disgust, as the banal collides with more complex emotions. The book challenges readers to laugh as well as cry (or both) along with it, while asking some unsettling questions, of the world, of bodies, and one’s own self-image. The book is, by turn, parodic, anxious, celebratory, and self-mocking, while still gesturing to an idea of, if not lyric transcendence, then a celebration of brief revelatory moments amongst this century’s live and virtual detritus, its everyday glitches, bad moods and dark pleasures.’

Praise for If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams:

‘What Sally Rooney would write if she wrote for fun. From an ode to the old women changing in swimming pool shower blocks, to a list of celebrities who own islands for self-care, to her own version of Alanis Morrisesette's "not literally ironic but inconvenient, f****d, or borderline cruel" iconic song, Eloise Grills is crazy-talented, darkly funny and, obviously, very sexy. If you loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, try this one by Eloise Grills.’

-Emma Co (Bookseller, Better Read Than Dead)

First edition. Perfect bound. 114 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147589

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Parenthetical Bodies by Alex Gallagher holds you close and says “it’s okay, things are weird”. These poems are about what it takes to be in and amongst bodies, to be loving and empathetic in the internet age, or to survive in a city being slowly crushed under the weight of its own housing bubble.

Parenthetical Bodies explores queerness and transgressive bodies. Hope glimmers and shakes as Gallagher entwines tenderness and heartache, surfing dogs and estrogen pills. Gallagher’s debut collection is packed with writing that is instantly loveable and as eviscerating as it is gentle.

Second edition with a new cover. Perfect bound. 52 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147510 

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