Bücher veröffentlicht von Recent Work Press

In this volume, five prose poets explore the Five major oceans as they are currently classified: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Southern and the Arctic.Each 21-part sequence of poems is a particular-and sometimes oblique-rumination on one of these vast bodies of water. Together they offer an inspiring and sometimes troubling exploration of our relationship with what is, essentially, a single oceanic entity.

The Sea Chest is a visceral, moving, and emotionally layered account of life in the aftermath of loss. In 2017, Kerry Greer's husband Gabriel ended his life with horrific violence, dying on the kitchen floor of his parents' home.Haunting in its honesty, and underpinned by a connection to the spirituality of the natural world, The Sea Chest traces the impact of Gabriel's death over years and continents. The collection provides a counter-narrative to ideas of grief portrayed in sympathy cards or Hollywood movies. There is no redemptive narrative arc, no going "back to normal." But there is the old love-the indissoluble thread that is now called grief.Imagistic and probing, The Sea Chest speaks directly into the void. In the stillness, in the grey: a ripple, an answer from the ether, asking the reader to listen, to not turn away. The Sea Chest becomes a holding space for grief-for the things which cannot be said out loud, but which need to be voiced. This is poetry as invocation, poetry as love enacted, poetry as gateway to the liminal and the sacred.

Feldspar, the new collection of poetry from Brendan Ryan, is unflinching in its focus on rural landscapes, the treatment of farm animals and the humble lives of people often missing from poetry. There are odes to invigilators, truck drivers, a family member who took to walking, laments for dogs and the hardened realities of country living. A sense of longing for and loss from the country is a sub-text for poems that reveal how place is never only a geographical location, but more of a state of mind to be revisited again and again and where belonging can also be found in music, driving or looking at the country you inevitably return to.

For over a decade, international poets Alvin Pang (Singapore) and George Szirtes (UK) have met time and again-as friends and fellow wordsmiths on page and stage-until the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Confined to different sides of the globe, they began to write poems back and forth in response to one another. Reflecting on the circumstances in which we find ourselves living, the two poets dance in language through questions of life and time, with the world teetering from Covid through Black Lives Matters and Brexit to the Ukraine conflict.

Erin Shiel's debut collection brings together insightful vignettes about the arc of maturity to womanhood, exploring kindness, grief and the neglected beauty of everyday life. The collection slips through multiple identities, interleaving ekphrasis with lyric and nature poems. The effect is a dynamic tension between fiction and truth, invention and autobiography. Many of the poems, imbued with nostalgia, reclaim the liminality of girlhood, as an opportunity to form identity. A ghost girl character appears guiding the reader through the sections of the collection, with poems related in turn to the themes of girlhood, identity, finding mettle and contemplating nature. With whimsy and playfulness, emotional insight and nuance, Girl on a Corrugated Roof uses empathy and the natural environment to draw art out of the gallery and into our everyday lives.

being one too law-abiding to smash windowsbeing free with spray can and ready-made slogan politicsthere is a line-my body is on the lineat risk and on fileIt's the 1970s and 1980s, and Sandra Renew, a young lesbian activist in Far North Queensland, is involved in some of the most politically charged moments in Australian history. From Pine Gap to civil rights marches in Queensland to the first Gay and Lesiban Mardi Gras and beyond, Apostles of Anarchy juxtaposes newspaper headlines and archival material with the personal experience of these struggles. It asks what it is to fight for the acceptance of difference in a discourse of prejudice and hostility.

Beginning in Sight is Theodore Ell's first poetry collection. It brings together work written over more than ten years, tapping into the memories, life-stories and mirror-images that resist time and recouple bygone experience to the drifting world of today. The poems branch out from Ell's original home of Sydney into its hinterland, the coast and the Hunter, snatching moments of respite and pleasure in troubled times, before finding new bearings in the Canberra region. Haunted by the presence of vanished lives and histories, these are poems of perseverance, endurance and a past that seems to know what is coming.

''F-words'' is less expletive, more reconnaissance flight. In this five-year exploratory survey of territory that might include poetry, Malins forays into fables, fauna and flora, family, feminism, faraway and further. Whether in factual, fictive, fabulist or forensic form, Malins is squinting through life''s surface reflections and writing what she glimpses underneath.

This latest project of ''authorised theft'' amongst poetic friends sees them raiding the 19th century for inspiration-across a variety of artforms. But C19 here is not just a past century; it is also the terrible present moment in which we live, and in which this remarkable collaborative work has been written.

The intimate details of daily life, the "blood and guts and heart" of the wounds and trauma of personal tragedy and love lost are Eileen Chong''s bedrock which she mines with unstinting courage and honesty in this new chapbook Dark Matter. The willingness to be so open and vulnerable lends her work great strength. With heart-rending integrity resolved in a harmony of content and form, this is serious and skillfully crafted work which in its earnest exploration reaches out beyond the personal, towards a higher, life affirming and universal.

From the epic of Gilgamesh to the laws of thermodynamics, from Rimbaud in Paris to unheard voices of literature, Sleeping Dogs is a visceral and often acerbic collection marked by Martin Dolan''s taut, undeniable lines and precise, crystalline language.

This Cathedral Grief responds to the death of Adrian Caesar''s sister, Karen, from pancreatic cancer in 2012-13. This book explores various dimensions of faith - secular, artistic and spiritual - in an attempt to wrest meaning from the blank of loss. Without supporting any single position or belief, these poems are provisional statements, charting the impossibility of celebrating or memorialising someone successfully, much less recovering that person through language.

In turns unsettling and funny, Oliver Driscoll's debut collection is a testament to the mundane resonances of contemporary life and language. Driscoll's wry eye captures the subtle whimsy of the everyday, while exploring the capacity of its language to disturb the field of human meaning.

...nothing has changed then since high school, since Sydney in the 1980s with its garage bands and women’s marches and university bars and hungover Sunday recovery meals at the Malaya when it was still by Central Station, before we all became solid.From the Afterword:Gladland is a poetic tale of what heartbreak can and can’t do to a modern woman. Set to a 1970s psychosonic soundtrack, and staged in various cities from Detroit to Rome and Perth, these poems are glamrock operettas of everyday life, well-versed in its romantic absurdities and glories.