Have we missed some best new poetry? Publishers, please send your advance book lists to our reviews and our editor inbox and we’ll include you next time!
Best new poetry books – quick links
Arsenic flower, Dakota Feirer – 30 September
In this debut collection, Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr man Dakota Feirer potently explores the legacy of generational trauma and the cultural wisdom of First Nations people. In a landscape of loss, his words act as both spear and shield.
A Lick of Fireweed: Poems, Erik Jensen – 30 September
A sequel to Erik Jensen’s first collection of memoir poems, A lick of fireweed takes a spare and unflinching look at love and landscape. These poems are the diary of a relationship ending and the story of how small details can make the world beautiful and whole.
Peckinpah Suite, Peter Munden – 1 October
Paul Munden checks into the suite of rooms in the Murray Hotel, Livingston, Montana, once occupied by Sam Peckinpah, legendary director of The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and other notorious classics. For the poet, it is an act of homage and immersion, not without risk. Addressing Peckinpah directly, he reflects on the films – and the turmoil of their making – in poems both personal and finely attuned to Peckinpah’s own experience.
KONTRA, Eunice Andrada – 1 October
KONTRA by the Filipina-Australian poet enacts a poetics of clashing decadences, testing the tightrope between ‘feminine’ goodness and deviance, desire and refusal, reverence and repulsion.
Best new poetry books in September
How to Emerge, Jill Jones – 1 September, new poetry
This collection is filled with visions and ghosts, doubles and shadows. It also explores the living and damaged body, as it dances with humans, birds, animals, leaves, the weather, digital assemblage, sound and song, the elements and the planet.
DOGHOUSE, Holly Friedlander Liddicoat – 1 September, new poetry
DOGHOUSE is a map of 20-something millennial Sydney, drawn with sharp lines and a rough hand. Against the backdrop of climate disaster, lockdowns, Black Summer, and floods, these poems punch down backstreets, trying to keep alive.
Too Much Light, Laurence Levy-Atkinson – 1 September, new poetry
Born from lived experience, Too Much Night was written as a response to Laurence Levy-Atkinson’s collapse into and return from the depths of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, something he was unaware he had been suffering his entire life and whose eventual diagnosis was nothing short of a revelation.
Lithosphere, Ben Walter – 1 September
Compelling and strange, Ben Walter’s debut poetry collection explores our eccentric connections to the natural world – the flora and fauna, water and wind that burst through the valleys and peaks of the lithosphere, the hard, rocky crust of the Earth that makes all life possible.
màthair beinn, Eartha Davis – 1 September, new poetry
This debut collection is an ode to healing and gentleness. It rustles with return: a return to body, to wildness, to the steadily beating heart of presence.
The Abandoned Room, Paul Carter – 1 September, new poetry
The Abandoned Room is a diary of historical and personal homelessness. The title refers to Der Verlassene Raum, a Kristallnacht memorial located in central Berlin, whose bronze table and two chairs point to ‘the irretrievable losses that occurred when a people, their way of life and their culture went missing’.
The Wallace Line: A Poem, Jennifer MacKenzie – 1 September, no poetry
The Wallace Line: A Poem honours co-existence, a world of merging borders, where the oud can resonate along with the bird of paradise, the blue pigment in a Titian painting with the sound of a Javanese gamelan in moonlight.
Grief: Five sequences, Cassandra Atherton, Jen Webb, Oz Hardwick, Paul Hetherington, Paul Munden – 1 September
In this volume of prose poetry, five poets approach grief in different ways; the emotion sometimes recognisable, sometimes disguised. Their works grieve for those who are gone while they traverse the idea of the abiding presence of loss.
