Breath is an origin story
before breath is non-existence

Cyclonic storms inform the still eye of Earth's Breath. It's an eye that radiates out from the personal to the communal, tracking its subject matter through the lenses of history and myth. Susan Hawthorne's poetry shifts with seismic intensity, from tranquility to roar, bureaucratic inertia to survival, and the slow recovery from...

Modewarre is the indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories – her own, her forebears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. Three roads meeting in the one bird: modewarre (the indigenous), biziura lobata (the colonial), musk duck (the common).

Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. Only a poet could make us hear the thundering whisper of insanity, the endless circling of the revolving door, the sheer practicality of whatever gets you through the night. Here are portraits of other people in wards filled...