She is the Earth by Ali Cobby Eckermann
She Is the Earth is the luminous new verse novel from celebrated poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. It charts a journey through grief and celebrates the healing power of Country. We follow Eckermann’s soft footfalls in the open (but far from empty) spaces between earth and sky; from sandstone to wetlands, from plains to mountain ranges.
Eckermann’s writing soars in this meditative and transformative piece. Soaked in lightness and dark, history and dreaming, her words will move you, shake you, devastate you and uplift you. This book is full of unexpected beauty in slow, contemplative moments. Read it to see the ‘She’ in and around all of us.
Case Notes by David Stavanger
The follow up to the award-winning collection The Special, this electric new body of work by David Stavanger is a mix tape of free verse, lyric poetry, found text, spoken word and flash fiction documenting the lived/living mental health experience and the well beyond.
Pagong Cannot Climb Trees by Butch Schwarzkopf
In this debut work, Butch Schwarzkopf reaches out to the empty spaces: a too-quiet house, the end of the universe, a silenced colonial history, the grief of losing a loved one. Weaving cinematic past, present, and future to deep-rooted ancestral rhythms, Pagong Cannot Climb Trees is a moving reflection on the messiness of life and heritage, and a reminder of the beauty and humanity in trying, with every new day, to carry the burdens of the heart.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.
