Böcker utgivna av Recent Work Press

In Animals with Human Voices you will find worms that dream of god, jellyfish weary of immortality, a powerless Superman, some illogical observations on aliens'', a lightning conductor tired of lightning and the truth about Elvis. In multi award-winning poet Damen O''Brien''s debut collection, his cinematic eye and love of nature deliver poems which are ciphers for the normal concerns of every human: love, life and death and what we leave behind.

Stephen Gilfedder''s Way Stations features selected poems from the past 40 and more years. The chronology leads us from the contemporary to his initial fully realised work. Throughout, people - in their various guises, locations and predicaments - are the abiding concentration. An important aspect is the observation and recording of human mutability in time, place and circumstance. The personal dimension is explored across its contradictions, from commitment to uncertainty, to self-discovery and perseverance. Throughout the language is rich and rhythmic, steeped in the Australian vernacular.

If we are to speak, what is it we must speak? If we are allowed to speak, what is it we must say? Who constitutes the ''we'' that speaks? Anne Elvey''s new collection frames such questions against the contemporary world and its multiple challenges. These poems in turn explore environmental encounters, subtle and overt expressions of the political, the elisions of history, the embodiment of the world and the nature of grace, through poetry sharply attuned to its subject matter. For Elvey, poetry has an obligation not only to chart intimate moments, but also to draw those moments towards the numinous matter of our Earthy habitats.

Based on historical, biographical and geographic research, Sometimes a Woman explores the lives of 19th-century women-prostitutes and madams-who helped settle America's Wild West . Filled with voices that were mostly silenced in their era, these poems convey a variety of emotions, personalities and voices sometimes angry, usually feisty, and occasionally humorous. The poems, which vary in style and form, ranging from lyrical and narrative lineated poems to prose and found poems, pay tribute to and celebrate these women.

''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.

the moment, taken is Jennifer Compton''s eleventh book of poetry. At this late stage she has yielded to the absolute lure of eidectic memory. That is - ''relating to or denoting images having unusual vividness and detail as if actually visible.'' And there is the pleasure in poetry for her. The damage, the drama, the tableau, the tall tale and true. It must be knocked out of true. There are rules.

I am the glasswith all this insidemy transparent walls    the sun    the moon    the bubbles    all this intoxicationPenny Drysdale invites readers into her home and her transience as her relationship begins to end. It is never easy to get on with your life.  I am the glass is window into these tender invisible journeys. We watch her enchanted gestation.

What would you do if you looked up and saw that the night sky was darker than usual? That the stars had disappeared, and nobody was doing anything about it? What do you do when a loved one tells you that their world is darker than usual? That they see no light, and don''t know what to do about it?Errant Night is an exploration of resilience executed imperfectly. In this sequence of prose poems, Beaumont draws upon the sci-fi wonders of interstellar travel and spaceship mechanics to throw comparative light upon the realities of living with the burden of loss.

In Our Tongues Are Songs, Rico Craig pursues the intimate, the voices people use as they speak to their private fears. Craig brings his unique ear for lyricism, his eye for human need, to bear on the promises people make to themselves as they attempt to find solace, companionship and meaning. His haunting use of image fills the day-to-day world with the uncanny - bats are comforted by children, old women weep tattoos, the earth burns, television stars comfort teenagers as they struggle with anorexia, encroaching sands spill the dead into an unnamed city. This book spans voices, generations and countries; it sides with the young and old as they try to carve their humanity from the swirls of despair.

Paul Collis' first collection of poetry is a book of difficult truths and profound connections. It charts a life lived on the streets, on country, in the deep time of tradition, of relationships to land and family. This book mourns those who have passed, and the current state of places and people held close in the heart and in the kinds of knowledge inseparable from self that might be called 'being', but is always much more than that. It is also a poetry of hope in the hopeless, of beauty in small moments, and the overwhelming 'now' that is memory.

Intellectually ambitious and culturally engaged, these poems speak of Sartre, Zola and Jackson Pollock, of Western Australia's firewatch trees and Dubbo's gibbons, of the poet-batsman Stevie Smith, of youth and age. Ranging in form, James Lucas's poems ask to be reread rather than assented to, and are written in the belief that poetry is both solvent and fresh lick of paint.

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.

In each of the stories in this collection, the authors examine the conundrum and contradiction of human experience through carefully crafted narrative detail. The brevity of short-form fiction makes it an apt vessel for capturing the haunting incompleteness of human experience. Memorable short stories resonate because they are attentive to specificities and particularities: to detail as it relates to a distinct focalising consciousness. The authors in this collection employ narrative detail with intuitive hands and minds, fashioning an apprehended fictional world, an abstracted reality that resonates beyond the final lines of text. Each story here is marked by the urgency of idea, captured as raw sensory data. Collectively, they are attentive to the crucial relationship between idiosyncratic voice and sharply rendered detail, creating an experiential world that 'feels real' to the reader.Featuring: Joshua Kemp, Margaret Hickey, Joshua Hayes, Deb Wain, Anne Hotta, Thomas Hamlyn-Harris, Judi Morrison, Chemutai Glasheen, Annabel Stafford, Suzanne Hermanockzi, Sophie Overett.This project was generously supported by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing in Australasia.

These poems emerged slowly, and through aleatory conversations between Shé and Jen, in which they identified points of connection in and beyond poetry. Both poets are interested in experiment, and in women poets' voices; both have lived in Western Australia and been captivated by the light, the space, and the vastness of that state; and both poets have spent a fair bit of time in mourning and in responding to the loss of loved one. They are also interested in movement in creative and scholarly terms. For Shé, the elemental world is a motivating force; for Jen, it's travel-hence the title of this joint publication.

When Charity finds letters, journals and sketches in the roof of her great-aunt's house, she uncovers a rich family history that she must piece together from fragments. Great-aunt Birdie's letters to her lover are a compelling and revealing account of life for many women in the 1930s. Her experiences as an artist in the first decades of the century, and her earlier relationship with a young man who goes to war, also provide powerful insights into a woman who, as Charity begins to suspect, wanted more than her era would allow.

Dominique Hecq's latest collection is an autobiographical journey into the real and imaginary of Australia. With her 'faux-Romantic' preconceptions, Hecq arrives in Australia from Europe in 1985, after a long fascination with the literature of a country she would eventually call home. Spanning thirty years, Tracks fictionalises this journey of uncovering the complex layers of a foreign land and of discovering its people, places and prejudices.

The Incompleteness Book is the result of a call for contributions to the theme: the incompleteness of human experience. The call was distributed inApril 2020, amidst the global pandemic of COVID-19. The collection takes an interest in the relationship between the haunting incompleteness of human experience and short form writing. This, together with the unforeseen challenges of COVID-19, as well as the lure of coming together as writers, is the impetus for the book. The submissions are aimed at capturing our individual and collective experience as a composite picture. The contributions were collected in just nine days. This project was generously supported by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academicbody representing the discipline of Creative Writing in Australasia.

Doggerland is the name of a once fertile and populated land mass, now submerged under the North Sea, that once connected the British Isles with Europe. In the winter of 2017/18, Doggerland was clearly visible once again from the coast near the town where Moya Pacey was born and raised. In Pacey''s hands, this phenomenon works as a metaphor for how memory works in bringing to the surface images, glimpses, stories, people and places appearing and disappearing, in no set order, around the space of this collection of poems.Doggerland revisits a time of post World War II northern England, replete with traditional norms and values, and darknesses waiting to emerge above the water of everyday life.

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 author of the award-winning Things I''ve thought to tell you since I saw you last comes a new collection of poems steeped in a sense of dark foreboding. Jumping from the global to the everyday, many of the poems in Nigh chime with the mood that all is not right with the world. Even in the seemingly mundane, or the overtly beautiful, lay some uncomfortable truths, waiting to be unpicked. Nigh fully displays the confidence of a poet looking and thinking deeply about the world and offering it up in crisp and beguiling.

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.

Matt Hetherington's seventh collection is a palindromic homage to the personal, the political, and the personal as political. Filled with playful, sometimes cheeky poetry, Kaleidoscopes is also a book of intimate observations, of relationships and gratitutude, of things missing and abundant, and of a poet seeking to find his place in a difficult but ultimately joyful world.

The latest collection from Benjamin Dodds interprets the bizarre true story of Lucy, a chimpanzee raised as the 'daughter' of Oklahoma psychotherapist Dr Maurice Temerlin during the 1960s and 70s. With deep empathy and an eye for subtle, telling moments, Dodds offers a complex reimagination of Lucy's fraught hybrid life through unflinching poems that fascinate and unsettle in equal measure.