John Foulcher’s ‘Before the Storm’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s ACT States of Poetry 2017 Anthology, April 2017.
William Fox’s ‘The Western District’ appeared in Meanjin, Volume 76, Issue 1, Autumn 2017.
Angela Gardner’s ‘Unkempt if You Will’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 August 2017.
Lisa Gorton’s ‘Empirical VII’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Victoria States of Poetry 2017 Anthology, April 2017.
Phillip Hall’s ‘Inheritance’ appeared in Southerly, Volume 76, Issue 2, January 2017.
Natalie Harkin’s ‘Heart’s Core Lament’ appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Issue 7, Number 1, June 2017.
Jennifer Harrison’s ‘The Tent’ appeared in the Weekend Australian, 14 January 2017.
Dimitra Harvey’s ‘Acrocorinth’ appeared in Philament Journal, Issue 22, December 2016.
John Hawke’s ‘Zero Degrees’ appeared in Australian Book Review, Number 386, November 2016.
Dominique Hecq’s ‘The Hanged Man’ appeared in Meniscus, Volume 5, Issue 1, June 2017.
Paul Hetherington’s ‘Inchings and Belongings: After Paul Strand’ appeared in Westerly, Volume 61, Number 2, November 2016.
Barry Hill’s ‘Mister Lincoln or Camp David’ appeared in the Weekend Australian, 22 July 2017.
Andy Jackson’s ‘Song not for you’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 November 2016.
Clive James’s ‘Head Wound’ appeared in Kenyon Review, Volume 39, Number 2, March 2017.
Carol Jenkins’s ‘Barns in Charlevoix’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 May 2017.
A. Frances Johnson’s ‘Greenfield development’ appeared in the Canberra Times, 4 March 2017.
Jill Jones’s ‘Murray andante’ appeared in Griffith Review, Edition 55, January 2017.
Amanda Joy’s ‘Almost Pause/ Pareidolia’ appeared in her collection Snake Like Charms, UWA Publishing, Perth, February 2017.
Carmen Leigh Keates’s ‘To Paint the Inside of a Church’ appeared in Axon: Creative Explorations, Volume 6, Number 2, November 2016.
Antigone Kefala’s ‘On Loss’ appeared in her collection Fragments, Giramondo, Sydney, August 2016.
John Kinsella’s ‘A New Norcia Subset’ appeared in Westerly, Volume 62, Number 1, July 2017.
Louis Klee’s ‘Windborne Avenue’ appeared in Meanjin, Volume 75, Issue 3, Spring 2016.
Mike Ladd’s ‘The Corpse Flower Sketch’ appeared in the Weekend Australian, 21 January 2017.
Anthony Lawrence’s ‘A Tasting’ appeared in his collection 101 Poems, Pitt Street Poetry, Sydney, November 2017.
Bronwyn Lea’s ‘Zeitgeist’ appeared in Australian Book Review, Number 391, May 2017.
Jeanine Leane’s ‘Over the River Memory’ appeared in Rabbit Poetry Journal, Issue 21, May 2017.
Emma Lew’s ‘Rattling the Forms’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 August 2017.
Cassie Lewis’s ‘In Memoriam’ appeared in her collection The Blue Decodes, Grand Parade Poets, Sydney, October 2016.
Bella Li’s ‘The Novelist Elena Ferrante’ appeared in her collection Argosy, Vagabond Press, Sydney, February 2017.
Jennifer Maiden’s ‘Metronome’ appeared in her collection The Metronome, Giramondo, Sydney, March 2017.
Caitlin Maling’s ‘Fisheries Raid’ appeared in Rabbit Poetry Review, Issue 19, November 2016.
David McCooey’s ‘One Way or Another’ appeared in his collection Star Struck, UWA Publishing, Perth, October 2016.
Peter Minter’s ‘Remembering Sandstone Country’ appeared in Kenyon Review, Volume 39, Number 2, March 2017.
Marjon Mossammaparast’s ‘The Spanish Revelation’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 18 June 2017.
Philip Neilsen’s ‘Anna Karenina’ appeared in Island, Issue 149, May 2017.
Geoff Page’s ‘Bombala’ appeared in Quadrant, Volume 60, Issue 9, September 2016.
Claire Potter’s ‘The Hidden Side to Love’ appeared in Meanjin, Volume 75, Issue 4, Summer 2016.
Ron Pretty’s ‘Pigeons of the Dome’ appeared in Quadrant, Volume 61, Number 3, March 2017.
Brendan Ryan’s ‘The Lowlands of Moyne’ appeared in Antipodes, Volume 31, Number 1, July 2017.
Gig Ryan’s ‘Muzzled Altar’ appeared in Kenyon Review, Volume 39, Number 2, March 2017.
Tracy Ryan’s ‘Homeschooling’ appeared in the Weekend Australian, 3 December 2016.
Philip Salom’s ‘Strange Music’ appeared in Kenyon Review, Volume 39, Number 2, March 2017.
Jaya Savige’s ‘Fort Dada’ appeared in Kenyon Review Volume 39, Number 2, March 2017.
Michael Sharkey’s ‘Nudge Nudge’ appeared in Snorkel, Issue 23, September 2016.
Melinda Smith’s ‘Not to be’ appeared in Island, Issue 146, September 2016.
Vivian Smith’s ‘A Note to Alvaro’ appeared in Quadrant, Volume 61, Issue 7/8, July 2017.
Maria Takolander’s ‘Nox’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 August 2016.
Andrew Taylor’s ‘Shells’ appeared in his collection Impossible Preludes, Margaret River Press, Witchcliffe, October 2016.
Heather Taylor Johnson’s ‘When I am Gardening, When You Ask’ appeared in the Weekend Australian, 3 September 2016.
Tim Thorne’s ‘Waking’ appeared in Australian Book Review’s Tasmanian States of Poetry 2016 Anthology, April 2017.
Mark Tredinnick’s ‘The Habit of Wings’ appeared in Axon: Creative Explorations, Capsule 1 (Special Issue), August 2016.
Todd Turner’s ‘Horse’ appeared in the Weekend Australian, 7 January 2017.
John Upton’s ‘Crossing Galata, Istanbul’ appeared in Overland, Issue 227, Winter 2017.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s ‘Even Solomon in All His Glory’ appeared in Kenyon Review, Volume 39, Number 2, March 2017.
John Watson’s ‘Long-On’ appeared in The Danger Island garbage boat, Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle, October 2016.
Alan Wearne’s ‘The Barassi Variations’ appeared in his collection These Things Are Real, Giramondo, Sydney, July 2017.
Petra White’s ‘A Quiet Morning’ appeared in her collection Reading for a Quiet Morning, Gloria SMH Press, Melbourne, May 2017.
Jessica L. Wilkinson’s ‘Apollon Musagète’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 March 2017.
Chloe Wilson’s ‘The First Four Hours’ appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, 1 May 2017.
Fiona Wright’s ‘A queer and sultry summer’ appeared in Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain, UWA Publishing, Perth, May 2017.
Rae Desmond Jones’s ‘III’ appeared in his collection A Caterpillar on a Leaf, Puncher and Wattmann, Sydney, 2016.
Notes on Contributors
THE EDITOR
Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic. Her most recent book of poems, The Hazards (UQP), won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and 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 is the recipient of the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, among other honours. She presently lives in Brisbane, where she works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at QUT, and the poetry editor of Island.
POETS
Fay Zwicky (1933–2017) published nine books of poetry, the most recent of which is her Collected Poems, edited by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin (UWAP, 2017). She also edited several anthologies of Australian poetry, published a book of short stories, Hostages (FACP, 1983), and a collection of critical essays, The Lyre in the Pawnshop (UWAP, 1986). Her many awards include the NSW Premier’s Award, the WA Premier’s Award, the Patrick White Award and the Christopher Brennan Award.
Robert Adamson’s latest collection of poetry, Net Needle, was published by Black Inc. in Australia and by Flood Editions in the USA in May 2015, and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in May 2016. It was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Poetry Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. At the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May 2016, Adamson launched an Australian issue of Poetry, which he edited with Don Share, editor of Chicago’s Poetry Foundation. He edited Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems 2009 and The Best Australian Poems 2010.
Jordie Albiston has published ten poetry collections and a handbook on poetic form. Albiston possesses an ongoing pre-occupation 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 Prize. She lives in Melbourne.
Cassandra Atherton is a prose-poet and scholar. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English in 2016 and has been awarded a VicArts and Australian Council Grant for her prose poetry on the atomic bomb. She has written eight books and is the poetry editor of Westerly.
Luke Beesley is a Melbourne-based poet. His most recent collection is Jam Sticky Vision (Giramondo, 2015). His fifth collection, Aqua Spinach (Giramondo), is forthcoming.
Judith Beveridge is the author of six award-winning collections. Her New and Selected Poems will appear in 2018. She was a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal in 2005 and was the poetry editor for Meanjin during 2005–2015. Her work has been widely anthologised and translated.
Judith Bishop is a poet and professional linguist. Her first poetry collection, Event, won the Anne Elder award and was shortlisted for the CJ Dennis Prize, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the ASAL Mary Gilmore Prize. A second collection, Interval, is forthcoming from UQP in March 2018.
Kim Cheng Boey was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia in 1997. He taught Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle for 13 years, before returning to Singapore as an Associate Professor in English at Nanyang Technological University. He has published five collections of poetry, a travel memoir entitled Between Stations, as well as a historical novel on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.
Ken Bolton – what’s to say? His most recent books are Lonnie’s Lament from Wakefield Press, London Journal/London Poem from Vagabond and Threefer from Puncher & Wattmann. He lives in Adelaide.
Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ghostspeaking, which won the 2017 Kenneth Slessor poetry Prize. He has translated poetry by José Kozer, Marosa di Giorgio and Eugenio Montejo, among others.
Margaret Bradstock has six published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017.
Lisa Brockwell lives on a rural property near Byron Bay 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, published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2016, was commended in the Anne Elder Award.
David Brooks’s most recent collections are Open House (poetry, UQP, 2015), Napoleon’s Roads (short fiction, UQP, 2016) and Derrida’s Breakfast (essays, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2016).
Pam Brown is an editor, reviewer and author of various chapbooks and pamphlets as well as many books of poetry. A new collection, Click here for what we do, is due from Vagabond Press in 2018. She lives in Alexandria, Sydney.
Joanne Burns is a Sydney poet. Her most recent poetry collection Brush (Giramondo Publishing, 2014) won the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. She is working towards a new collection, Apparently, as well as assembling a selected volume of her work, Real Land.
Michelle Cahill is a Sydney poet and critic. Her debut fiction Letter to Pessoa won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award. Her work appears in the Forward Book of Poetry 2018.
Lee Cataldi has been a teacher and a linguist and has edited a collection of Warlpiri narratives and compiled a dictionary of the Ngardi language. Her three books of poetry have won the Ann Elder award, the Human Rights prize and the NSW Premier’s Prize respectively.
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.
Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. Her books have been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her latest collection, Another Language, is with George Braziller in New York.
Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Five Islands Press published her book of poetry, Now You Shall Know, in 2014. The title poem won the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2013.
Stuart Cooke’s latest poetry collection is Opera (Five Islands Press, 2016). He lives on the Gold Coast, where he lectures at Griffith University. ‘Fallen Myrtle Trunk’ was the winner of the 2016 New Shoots Poetry Prize.
Shevaun Cooley is a Western Australian poet, essayist, and climber. Her poetry has been published in Cordite, Island, Poetry Wales, Meanjin, Southerly, and more, and her work shortlisted for both the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, Homing, was released in 2017.
Judith Crispin is a poet and photographer. Her works are variously published and exhibited in Australia and Europe. Judith’s first collection of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers, was published in 2015 by Puncher and Wattmann. Her newest book, The Lumen Seed, photographs, poems and commentaries, was published by Daylight Books (January 2017).
Sarah Day’s most recent book is Tempo (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014). It won the Michel Wesley Wright Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Awards.
Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane, Australia. Her work has appeared in Cordite, Mascara, Meanjin, Peril, and elsewhere. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP, 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.
B. R. Dionysius was born in 1969 in Dalby. He has since lived in Ipswich and Brisbane where he is an English teacher at Ipswich Grammar School, was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival and in his spare time watches birds.
Lucy Dougan’s books include White Clay (Giramondo, 2008), Meanderthals (Web del Sol, 2011) and The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015). In 2016 The Guardians won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award.
Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne and was involved in the poetry worlds of that city and Sydney. In 2006 he moved to England and currently lives in Faversham, Kent. He has published some twenty books of poems, the most recent being No Particular Place To Go (Shearsman, 2017), Allotments (Shearsman, 2014), and a reissue of his first two books as East & Under the Weather (Puncher & Wattman, 2014).
Adrienne Eberhard’s third collection, This Woman, was shortlisted for the 2013 Tasmania Book Prize. A new collection is forthcoming from Black Pepper. She is currently writing poems spoken by Marie Antoinette and her contemporary, Marie Girardin, who sailed in Tasmanian waters disguised as a man in 1792/93.
Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet. She is the author of seven books, including the verse novel Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books, 2012; Flood Editions, 2015), the poetry collection Inside My Mother (Giramondo Publishing, 2015), and the memoir Too Afraid to Cry (Ilura Press, 2013). In 2017 she was awarded Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize in Poetry.
Stephen Edgar’s most recent book is Transparencies (Black Pepper, 2
017). His previous two books, Exhibits of the Sun and Eldershaw, were both shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Anne Elvey is author of Kin (FIP, 2014) and managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. White on White is forthcoming from Cordite Books in early 2018. She holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity.
Russell Erwin is a farmer in the Southern Tablelands of NSW. He has had five books published, the most recent being Maps of Small Countries (Gininderra Press, 2016).
Diane Fahey is the author of twelve poetry collections, most recently A House by the River. She has been awarded various poetry prizes and international residencies, and received literary grants from the Australia Council, and the Victorian and South Australian Governments. She lives in Clifton Springs in Victoria.
Michael Farrell’s books include A Lyrebird: Selected Poems, Cocky’s Joy, I Love Poetry, and Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945. He co-edited Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. Originally from Bombala, NSW, Michael lives in Melbourne. He edits Flash Cove.
Susan Fealy is a Melbourne-based poet, reviewer, clinical psychologist and fellow in psychiatry at the University of Melbourne. This year she featured at the Perth Poetry Festival and Poetry on the Move (University of Canberra). Her first collection, Flute of Milk (UWAP, 2017), won the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize.
Liam Ferney’s most recent collection Content (Hunter Publishing, 2016) was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. His previous collection, Boom (Grand Parade Poets, 2013), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. He is a media manager, poet and aspiring left back living in Brisbane, Australia.
Luke Fischer’s books include A Personal History of Vision (UWAP Poetry, 2017), Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), and the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is an honorary associate in philosophy at the University of Sydney.
Toby Fitch is poetry editor for Overland. He lives in Sydney where he works as a teacher and an organiser of poetry events. His books include Rawshock, which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry 2012, Jerilderies, and The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond, 2016).
The Best Australian Poems 2017 Page 12