Books published by Recent Work Press

Meerabai (1498-1556) was a poet, singer and dancer and a devotee of Hindu god Krishna. She is revered as one of the prominent voices of the Bhakti Movement: a movement of religious reformation which valued personal engagement with deities over traditional ritualistic practices.Rain Clouds offers fifteen of her devotional love poems in both Hindi and English, translated by multi-lingual scholar and poet Subhash Jaireth.

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.

Man-handled, Melinda Smith's seventh poetry collection, includes the found-text chapbook Listen, bitch plus new work from the last three years. Its central concern is gendered violence, both verbal and physical. These poems also extend their gaze to violences perpetrated in the names of colonialism, nationalism and capitalism. It has been called her angriest book yet. Despite this, there are also poems celebrating moments of connection and wonder.

With a hovering intelligence and a laudable lack of ego, the beautifully controlled poems of 'Some Sketchy Notes on Matter' investigate the world with an ecstatic's eye.

In turns unsettling and funny, Oliver Driscoll's debut collection is a testament to the mundane resonances of contemporary life and language. Driscoll's wry eye captures the subtle whimsy of the everyday, while exploring the capacity of its language to disturb the field of human meaning.

...nothing has changed then since high school, since Sydney in the 1980s with its garage bands and women’s marches and university bars and hungover Sunday recovery meals at the Malaya when it was still by Central Station, before we all became solid.From the Afterword:Gladland is a poetic tale of what heartbreak can and can’t do to a modern woman. Set to a 1970s psychosonic soundtrack, and staged in various cities from Detroit to Rome and Perth, these poems are glamrock operettas of everyday life, well-versed in its romantic absurdities and glories.

The poems in (Un)belonging explore physical and psychological spaces, examining the consequences of a life lived on three continents, defined by separation from homelands and loved ones, shaped by departure and return, and the evolution and multiplication of identity. Throughout the collection, the setting continually moves from Australia to Ireland to the United States, making stops in England, Iceland, Greece, Italy, New Zealand and Slovakia. O’Reilly’s poetry engages with a range of concerns and obsessions, including identity, belonging, expatriation, immigration, exile, ancestry, landscape, alienation, homesickness, suburbia, fatherhood, nostalgia, death and grief … finding beauty, contentment and joy amidst an elusive quest for home.

A story time for the Anthropocene.Zoe Anderson’s first poetry collection uses elements of fairytale and mythology to reflect on landscape, love and ecological uncertainty. Accompanied by darkly heartfelt illustrations by Helani Laisk and playful typography by Caren Florance, this is a collection full of hope, imagination and truth.