The Best Australian Poems 2016
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Robert Gray’s ‘The Latter Days’ appeared in the Australian REVIEW, 20 February 2016.
Phillip Hall’s ‘Royalty’ appeared in Plumwood Mountain, vol. 2, no.2, September 2015.
Natalie Harkin’s ‘Cultural Precinct’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.
Dennis Haskell’s ‘Tinnitus’ appeared in his collection Ahead of Us (Fremantle Press, 2016).
Dominique Hecq’s ‘Archive Fever’ appeared in Axon, issue 9, 2016.
Paul Hetherington’s ‘Black Dress’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s ACT States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Fiona Hile’s ‘Relocation of the Big Prawn’ appeared in Axon, issue 10, 2016.
Andy Jackson’s ‘The change room’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 4 May 2016.
Lisa Jacobson’s ‘The Jews of Hamburg Speak Out’ appeared in Writing to the Wire, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen (UWAP, 2016).
Virginia Jealous’ ‘First contact, Kakadu’ appeared in the Weekend Australian, 11 June 2016.
A. Frances Johnson’s ‘Diary of an Anti-elegist’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Victorian States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Jill Jones’ ‘In Flight Entertainment’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.
Kit Kelen’s ‘takk for alt’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.
Cate Kennedy’s ‘Limbo’ appeared in Prayers of a Secular World, edited by Jordie Albiston and Kevin Brophy (Inkerman & Blunt, 2015).
John Kinsella’s ‘Spatial Realignment of Jam Tree Gully’ appeared in the Australian Book Review, October 2015.
Andy Kissane’s ‘Getting away with it’ appeared in the Weekend Australian REVIEW, 24 October 2015.
Shari Kocher’s ‘Foxstruck’ appeared in the Australian Poetry Journal, vol. 5, issue 2, November 2015.
Simeon Kronenberg’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 75, no. 1, Autumn 2016.
Verity Laughton’s ‘Kangarilla, Summer, 2016’ appeared in Australian Book Review, no. 380, April 2016.
Anthony Lawrence’s ‘Wax Cathedral’ appeared in his collection Headwaters (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016).
Bronwyn Lea’s ‘Blow Job (kama sutra)’ appeared in Island, no.144 (2016).
Kate Lilley’s ‘Lovestore’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2016.
Kate Llewellyn’s ‘Possibly’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s South Australian States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Cameron Lowe’s ‘Pastoral/“Asset Management”’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Victorian States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Jennifer Maiden’s ‘Orchards’ appeared in her collection The Fox Petition (Giramondo, 2015).
Caitlin Maling’s ‘Intimacy’ appeared in Island, no. 145 (2016).
David Malouf’s ‘Visitation on Myrtle Street’ appeared in Australian Book Review, 15 April 2016.
Kate Middleton’s ‘Study of a Lion’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s NSW States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Peter Minter’s ‘Craft’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 75, no. 1, 15 June 2016.
Les Murray’s ‘Nuclear Family Bees’ appeared in his collection Waiting for the Past (Black Inc, 2015).
π.o.’s ‘Shakespeare & the State Library’ appeared in Fitzroy: The Biography (Collective Effort Press, 2015).
Ella O’Keefe’s ‘Letter from the swimming pool’ appeared in Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry, edited by Daniel Benjamin and Claire Marie Stancek (Giramondo, 2016).
Meredi Ortega’s ‘Cyborg Me’ appeared in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy (Hunter Publishers, 2016).
Geoff Page’s ‘Ekphrasis’ appeared in the Australian, 20 February 2016.
Charmaine Papertalk-Green & John Kinsella’s from ‘Hawes – God’s Intruder’ appeared in Southerly, vol. 75, no. 2, February 2016.
Felicity Plunkett’s ‘“A Decidedly Pathological Process:’ appeared in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy (Hunter Publishers, 2016).
Hessom Razavi’s ‘Shabnam Nightwish’ appeared in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy (Hunter Publishers, 2016).
Peter Rose’s ‘The Subject of Feeling’ appeared in his collection The Subject of Feeling (UWAP, 2015).
Robyn Rowland’s ‘Night Watch’ appeared in Falling and Flying: Poems on Ageing, edited by Judith Beveridge and Dr Sue Ogle (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2015).
Gig Ryan’s ‘Astronomical Twilight’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 4 May 2016.
Thomas Shapcott’s ‘The body’ appeared in the Age, 9 July 2016.
Alex Skovron’s ‘Around the World’ appeared in the Australian Poetry Anthology 2015, edited by Brook Emery and Sarah Holland-Batt (Australian Poetry, 2015).
John Tranter’s ‘Young Folly’ appeared in Overland, vol. 220, Spring 2015.
Ellen van Neervan’s ‘Invisible Spears’ appeared in Overland, vol. 220, Spring 2015.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s ‘Altogether Elsewhere’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 October 2015.
Simon West’s ‘A Plein-Air Artist Reflects on Timing’ appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 2015.
Petra White’s ‘On This’ appeared in Writing to the Wire, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen (UWAP, 2016).
Jessica L. Wilkinson’s ‘FAUNE et JEUX’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Victorian States of Poetry anthology (2016).
Ouyang Yu’s ‘Self Publishing’ appeared in his collection Fainting with Freedom (Five Islands Press, 2015).
Fay Zwicky’s ‘Boat Song’ appeared in Writing to the Wire, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen (UWAP, 2016).
Billy Marshall Stoneking’s ‘One Last Poem’ appeared in Transnational Literature, vol. 8.1, Nov 2015.
Notes on Contributors
THE EDITOR
Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, an Asialink Literature Residency, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. She was educated at the University of Queensland and New York University, where she was the 2010 W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar. Her most recent book of poems, The Hazards (UQP), was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, the AFAL John Bray Memorial Poetry Award, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She presently lives in Brisbane, where she works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at QUT, and the poetry editor of Island.
POETS
Martin Harrison was an Australian poet and essayist. He worked at the ABC as a producer and broadcaster. For many years Martin taught writing and sound studies at the University of Technology in Sydney. The hundreds of students he mentored into successful writing careers constitute part of his legacy. Martin died in September 2014.
Robert Adamson’s latest collection, Net Needle (Black Inc., 2015), was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. The Golden Bird (Black Inc., 2009) won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The Goldfinches of Baghdad (Flood, 2006) won the Age Book of the Year Award for poetry and was shortlisted for the NSW and Queensland premiers’ awards.
Adam Aitken is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013). His most recent poetry and essays have appeared in Southerly, Axon and Transnational Literature. His memoir, One Hundred Letters Home (Vagabond Press), was published in 2016.
Jordie Albiston has published nine poetry collections and a handbook on poetic form. Jordie possess
es an ongoing preoccupation with mathematical constructs and constraints, and the possibilities offered in terms of poetic structure. Her work has won many awards, including the Mary Gilmore Award and the 2010 NSW Premier’s Award. She lives in Melbourne.
Chris Andrews teaches at Western Sydney University. He has published two collections of poems: Cut Lunch (Indigo, 2002) and Lime Green Chair (Waywiser, 2012). He has also translated books of Latin American fiction, including Ema: César Aira the Captive (New Directions, 2016).
Evelyn Araluen is a PhD candidate and educator working with Indigenous literatures at the University of Sydney, and a founding member of Students Support Aboriginal Communities, a NSW grassroots activist network. Her father’s ancestors are Bundjalung, and her mother’s Wiradjuri. She lives between Dharug and Eora country.
Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Devadatta’s Poems (Giramondo, 2014), which was shortlisted for the NSW and Queensland premiers’ poetry prizes and the Prime Minister’s Poetry Award. Her new and selected poems will appear in 2017.
Ken Bolton is a poet, art critic, editor and publisher. Originally from Sydney, he has lived in Adelaide since 1982. ‘Dark Heart’ was the name of a not very good exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, in 2014. The version of ‘You’re My Thrill’ is by Pepper Adams.
Peter Boyle was born in Melbourne but has lived most of his life in Sydney. He has seven collections of poetry, most recently Ghostspeaking (Vagabond Press, 2016), Towns in the Great Desert (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and Apocrypha (Vagabond Press, 2009). He has translated poetry extensively from French and Spanish.
Michael Brennan is an Australian writer based in Tokyo, Japan. His books include The Imageless World (Salt Publishing, 2003), Unanimous Night (Salt Publishing, 2008) and Autoethnographic (Giramondo, 2012). Since 1999, he has run Vagabond Press (www.vagabondpress.net).
Lisa Brockwell lives on a rural property near Byron Bay, Australia, with her husband and young son. She was runner-up in the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2015. Her first collection, Earth Girls, was published in 2016 by Pitt Street Poetry.
David Brooks’ most recent publications are Open House (poetry: UQP, 2015), Napoleon’s Roads (short fiction: UQP, 2015) and Derrida’s Breakfast (essays: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2016). An Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, he is co-editor of Southerly and the 2015/16 Australia Council Fellow in Fiction.
Kevin Brophy is the author of fourteen books of fiction, poetry and essays, including This is What Gives Us Time (Gloria SMH Press, 2016). In 2015 he was poet in residence at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.
Lachlan Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields, Sydney. He currently teaches and researches at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga. Lachlan’s first book of poetry, Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012), was highly commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His second volume of poetry (forthcoming in 2017) explores aspects of his Chinese/Australian heritage.
Pam Brown has been active in many ventures in the multitudinous and continually shifting zone of Australian poetry and in other cultural scenes for over four decades. She is a contributing editor for several magazines and independent publishers. Her eighteenth book, Missing up, was published by Vagabond Press in 2015.
Joanne Burns’ most recent poetry collection is brush (Giramondo, 2014), the winner of the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. She is currently assembling a selected volume of her work called real land, spanning over four decades of book and journal publication. She lives in Sydney.
Michelle Cahill is an award-winning poet and fiction author. Her recent books are Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo, 2016), Night Birds (Vagabond Press, 2014) and Vishvarupa (Five Islands Press, 2011), which was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in Island, the Weekend Australian and Sydney Review of Books.
Elizabeth Campbell was born in Melbourne in 1980. She has been the recipient of many prizes, including the Vincent Buckley Prize, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and an Australia Council residency in Rome. Her books, Letters To The Tremulous Hand (2007) and Error (2011), are published by John Leonard Press.
Bonny Cassidy’s most recent book is Final Theory (Giramondo, 2014). She is Feature Reviews Editor for Cordite Poetry Review, and, with Jessica L. Wilkinson, co-edited Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016). Bonny lectures in Creative Writing at RMIT University.
Julie Chevalier writes poetry and short fiction in Sydney. Her second poetry collection, Darger: his girls (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012), was awarded the Alec Bolton Prize for an Unpublished Poetry Manuscript, and shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Poetry Prize. Permission to Lie, a short story collection, was published by Spineless Wonders in 2011.
Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. Her books are Burning Rice (2012), Peony (2014) and Painting Red Orchids (2016), all from Pitt Street Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the Anne Elder Award and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, amongst others. Another Language is forthcoming with George Braziller in New York City in Spring 2017.
Aidan Coleman lives in Adelaide. His two collections of poetry have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. He also writes reviews, speeches and Shakespeare textbooks.
Stuart Cooke is a poet and critic based on the Gold Coast, where he lectures at Griffith University. His books include Opera (Five Islands Press, 2016), George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle (Puncher & Wattman, 2014) and Edge Music (Vagabond Press, 2011).
MTC Cronin has published twenty books (poetry, prose poems and essays). Recent collections include In Possession of Loss (Shearsman Books, 2014) and The Law of Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), the latter of which was written over two decades.
Nathan Curnow is a past editor of Going Down Swinging. His previous books include The Ghost Poetry Project (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009), RADAR (Walleah Press, 2012) and The Right Wrong Notes (Macau ASM, 2015). His most recent collection, The Apocalypse Awards (ASP, 2016), is inspired by the absurdity of the modern world and charts our collective obsession with the end times.
Luke Davies is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. His Interferon Psalms (Allen & Unwin, 2011) won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. His other books include Running With Light (Allen & Unwin, 1999) and Totem (Allen & Unwin, 2004). The film of his novel Candy (Ballantine Books, 1997), from which Davies adapted his own screenplay, starred the late Heath Ledger. His film Lion premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.
Sarah Day’s most recent book is Tempo (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and won the University of Melbourne Wesley Michel Wright Prize. She lives in Hobart where she teaches Year 12 Creative Writing. Her poems have been widely anthologised in Australia and overseas.
Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist and speechwriter. His most recent collection of poetry, Year of the Wasp (Hunter Publishers), was published in May 2016.
Jelena Dinic arrived in Australia in 1993, during the collapse of Yugoslavia. She writes in Serbian and in English. Her poems and short stories have appeared in the Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Book Review, Going Down Swinging and many anthologies. Her chapbook Buttons on my Dress was published by Garron Publishing in 2015.
Dan Disney’s most recent publications include either, Orpheus (UWAP, 2016) and Report from a border (with John Warwicker; Light-Trap Press, 2016). He currently teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.
Lucy Dougan’s books include White Clay (Giramondo, 2008) and Meanderthals (Web del Sol, 2012). Her latest book, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), was shortlisted for the 2015 Queensland premier’s award for poetry and the 2016
Victorian and Western Australian premiers’ awards for poetry. She lectures in Creative Writing at Curtin University and works for Westerly.
Laurie Duggan, born in Melbourne in 1949 and later a resident of Sydney and Brisbane, moved to Faversham, Kent, in 2006. His most recent books are Allotments (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2014) and a reissue of his first two books as East and Under the Weather (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014).
Ali Cobby Eckermann is a poet and memoirist. Her collections of verse include little bit long time (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010), Kami (Vagabond Press, 2010) and Love dreaming & other poems (Vagabond Press, 2012). Her two verse novels are His Father’s Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books, 2012).
Stephen Edgar has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent being Exhibits of the Sun (Black Pepper, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, as was his previous book, Eldershaw (Black Pepper, 2013). A new collection, Transparencies, is forthcoming.
Anne Elvey is the managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, and holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, Melbourne. Her recent publications include Kin (Five Islands, 2014), shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2015, and This Flesh That You Know (Leaf Press, 2015).
Michael Farrell is from Bombala, NSW and lives in Fitzroy, Melbourne. In 2015 he published Cocky’s Joy (Giramondo) and Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan). Other books include Open Sesame (Giramondo, 2012), A Raiders Guide (Giramondo, 2008), Break Me Ouch (3deep Publishing, 2006) and ode ode (Salt Publishing, 2002), as well as several chapbooks. ‘Death of a Year’ is for Martin, and for the Slovene poet Tomaž Šalamun, both of whom died in 2014.
Liam Ferney’s most recent collection is Content (Hunter Publishing, 2016). His second collection, Boom (Grand Parade Poets, 2013), was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Poetry Prize and the Queensland Poetry Prize. He is a media manager, poet and aspiring left back living in Brisbane, Australia.