Poetry

ISBN: 9780702262791
Title: ASK ME ABOUT THE FUTURE
Author: JESSEN REBECCA
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Full of zest and flair, Jessen's poems map constellations of desire, loss and longing. Riffing on the future (which isn't what it used to be), dating apps, despair, Bonnie Tyler, Taylor Swift and the lesbian bachelorette, they are set in interstellar queer utopias, maternity wards and single beds. Jessen's edgy, scintillating poems urge us all to be a 'little gay' and to celebrate existence inall its multiplicity.

These are poems of sly surprises, radical vulnerability, dark-edged humour and vast originality that gently encourage readers to acknowledge past traumas while forging ahead to embrace the future. Following Jessen's award-winning verse novel, Gap,this collection confirms her as a major talent of her generation.


Imprint: University of Queensland Press
RRP: $24.99

ISBN: 9781925735222
Title: AXIS BOOK 2
Author: CARRUTHERS A J
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The facts: AXIS Book 2 follows from AXIS Book 1: Areal as the second installment of my lifelong long poem. Written mostly on an ACER Aspire S 13 computer between 2015 and 2019, Book 2 is made of 3 microbooks – Blazar, Chorastics, Disk – & comprises 30 poems in total. Blazars; black hole objects with jet axes pointing towards earth. Chorastics; a chorus, a human cluster. Disk; the shape of some galaxies but also a compact storage device. Each microbook; equal number of lines for each register. Blazar in 3 registers (258 lines), Chorastics in 4 (680 lines), Disk in 5 (360). Ends with music.

‘AXIS forges an architecture of meaning, pattern and sound that functions like the mind of the poet in process. Brilliant, rigorous and enigmatic.’ ? Rochelle Owens


a.j. carruthers is an Australian-born experimental poet and critic.

Imprint: VAGABOND PRESS
RRP: $25.00

ISBN: 9781925780239
Title: BAFFLING GRAVITY
Author: SANT ANDREW
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Gravity as a physical influence, the weight of gravity, and gravity of thought and action are central to Andrew Sant’s new collection of poems — and so too is the means of baffling gravity, not the least by the deployment of wit. Gravity here is also baffling in the alternative sense, as a force or as a theory, which summons perplexity. These poems, wide ranging in time and place, are richly textured investigations of the world, its terrain and its people, by an alert, often restless, informed observer.

Imprint: Puncher and Wattmann
RRP: $25.00

ISBN: 9781509852925
Title: BEES
Author: DUFFY CAROL ANN
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother.

Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffy’s subject, sometimes it strays into the poem, or hovers at its edge. In the end, Duffy’s point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect. The Bees, at once intimate and public, is a work of great power from one of our most cherished poets.

Imprint: PICADOR
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9781852246754
Title: BEING ALIVE : THE SEQUEL TO STAYING ALIVE
Author: ASTLEY NEIL [ED]
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

'Being Alive' is the sequel to Neil Astley's 'Staying Alive', which became Britain's most popular poetry book because it gave readers hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world.

Now he has assembled this equally lively companion anthology for all those readers who've wanted more poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit.
'Being Alive' is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder. 'Staying Alive' didn't just reach a broader readership, it introduced thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry, giving them an international gathering of poems of great personal force, poems with emotional power, intellectual edge and playful wit. It also brought many readers back to poetry, people who hadn't read poetry for years because it hadn't held their interest.
'Being Alive' gives readers an even wider selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world. A third companion anthology, 'Being Human' (2011), completes this modern poetry trilogy.

Imprint: BLOODAXE BOOKS
RRP: $42.99

ISBN: 9781852248093
Title: BEING HUMAN : THE COMPANION ANTHOLOGY TO STAYING ALIVE AND BEING ALIVE
Author: ASTLEY NEIL [ED]
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

"Being Human" is the third book in the "Staying Alive" poetry trilogy. "Staying Alive" and its sequel "Being Alive" have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry.

"Being Human" is a companion volume to those two books - a world poetry anthology offering an even broader, international selection of 'real poems for unreal times'. The range of poetry here complements that of the first two anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about being human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder.
There are more great poems from the 20th century as well as many recent poems of rare imaginative power from the first decade of the 21st century. But this book is also rare in reflecting the concerns of readers from all walks of life. Such has been the appeal of "Staying Alive" and "Being Alive" that many people have written not only to express their appreciation of these books, but also to share poems which have been important in their own lives. "Being Human" draws on this highly unusual publisher's mailbag, including many talismanic personal survival poems suggested by our readers.

Imprint: BLOODAXE BOOKS
RRP: $42.99

ISBN: 9781982106607
Title: BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2020
Author: LEHMAN DAVID [ED]
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best' anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year's most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah's Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

Imprint: SCRIBNER
RRP: $35.00

ISBN: 9780060540425
Title: BEST POEMS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE : FROM CHAUCER THROUGH ROBERT FROST
Author: BLOOM HAROLD
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The "colossus among critics" (New York Times Magazine) presents his personal selection, with commentary, of the finest poems in the English language. This comprehensive anthology attempts to give the common reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry. The book features a large introductory essay by Harold Bloom called The Art of Reading Poetry, which presents his critical reflections of more than half a century devoted to the reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves most. In the case of all major poets in the language, this volume offers either the entire range of what is most valuable in their work, or vital selections that illuminate each figure's contribution. There are also headnotes by Harold Bloom to every poet in the volume as well as to the most important individual poems. Much more than any other anthology ever gathered, this book provides readers who desire the pleasures of a sublime art with very nearly everything they need in a single volume. It also is regarded as his final meditation upon all those who have formed his mind.

Imprint: Harper Collins
RRP: $39.99

ISBN: 9781574230017
Title: BETTING ON THE MUSE
Author: BUKOWSKI CHARLES
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: BACK IN STOCK SOON

Betting on the Muse is a combination of hilarious poetry and stories. Charles Bukowski writes about the real life of a working man and all that comes with it.

Imprint: ECCO
RRP: $32.99

ISBN: 9781925360851
Title: BLAKWORK
Author: WHITTAKER ALISON
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

A stunning mix of memoir, reportage, fiction, satire, and critique composed by a powerful new voice in poetry. Alison Whittaker’s BLAKWORK is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge; an incomprehensible loss, and the poet’s fearless examination of the present.

Whittaker is unsparing in the interrogation of familiar ideas – identifying and dissolving them with idiosyncratic imagery, layering them to form new connections, and reinterpreting what we know.

Imprint: MAGABALA
RRP: $24.99

ISBN: 9781324002338
Title: BLESSED AS WE WERE : Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018
Author: STERN GERALD
Format: HARD COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

For over four decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this “sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary” (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit.

Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in Last Blue (2002); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life—even when they are far in the past—in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses.

With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long “been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry” (New York Times Book Review).

Imprint: NORTON
RRP: $41.99

ISBN: 9781852248017
Title: BLOODAXE BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN POETS
Author: THAYIL JEET (ED)
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK

Jeet Thayil’s definitive selection covers 55 years of Indian poetry in English. It is the first anthology to represent not just the major poets of the past half-century – the canonical writers who have dominated Indian poetry and publishing since the 1950s – but also the different kinds of poetry written by an extraordinary range of younger poets who live in many countries as well as in India. It is a groundbreaking global anthology of 70 poets writing in a common language responding to shared traditions, different cultures and contrasting lives in the changing modern world.

Thayil’s starting-point is Nissim Ezekiel, the first important modern Indian poet after Tagore, who published his first collection in London in 1952. Aiming for “verticality” rather than chronology, Thayil’s anthology charts a poetry of astonishing volume and quality. It pays homage to major influences, including Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, who died within months of each other in 2004. It rediscovers forgotten figures such as Lawrence Bantleman and Gopal Honnalgere, and it serves as an introduction to the poets of the future.

The book also shows that many Indian poets were mining the rich vein of ‘chutnified’ (Salman Rushdie’s word) Indian English long before novelists like Rushdie and Upamanyu Chatterjee started using it in their fiction. It explains why Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri have said that Indian poetry in English has a longer, more distinguished tradition than Indian fiction in English.

The Indian poet now lives and works in New York, New Delhi, London, Itanagar, Bangalore, Berkeley, Goa, Sheffield, Lonavala, Montana, Aarhus, Allahabad, Hongkong, Montreal, Melbourne, Calcutta, Connecticut, Cuttack and various other global corridors. While some may have little in common in terms of culture (a number of the poets have never lived in India), this anthology shows how they are all bound by the intimate histories of a shared English language.

'The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil, is a labour of love that gathers the Indian poets writing in English from the past and the present, from within India, from outside. While there may not be a firm geographical location to the experience of being an Indian poet, there is certainly a firm emotional one' – Kiran Desai, Guardian Books of the Year

Imprint: BLOODAXE BOOKS
RRP: $29.99