Books published by Recent Work Press

Keijiro Suga’s Transit Blues  ponders wide horizons including man’s relationship with and impact on nature, with the passing of time, and what it is as humans to live in the presence of inevitable decline and death. A deeply thoughtful and percipient voice engages the reader, surreal and dreamlike imagery offering fresh and lucent perspectives. Essentially elegiac, seeking unity, clarity and connection Keijiro Suga’s poetry brings together refined philosophical thought and the wisdom of the heart. The dignified, ever sustaining and watchful presence of nature resonates throughout this elegantly paced and fine collection.

In a series of textured prose currents, UNINTERRUPTED TIME assays confluent moments of familial and intimate relations, tracing the mortal body's insistent and at times devastating transitions.

Sing to Me is a collection of poems prompted by classical Greek narratives in such sources as Homer, Hesiod and Ovid. Around Grecian orchards … in Trojan battlefields … washed up with Aphrodite … paeans reveal indictments and human concerns surface.

Beginning with a small rebellion, She Reconsiders Life on the Run, fearlessly and without sentimentality, charts a course through sexuality, loss and grief - via the science lab, the life of Virginia Woolf, and more - eventually arriving at love.

On 21 July, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to step onto the moon, uttering those famous words: 'THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.' To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, we asked 50 poets to collaborate on this poetry anthology reflecting upon the achievement of Apollo 11 and our constantly evolving notions of 'space'. CONTRIBUTORS: Cassandra Atherton, Christian Bök, Robyn Bolam, Lisa Brockwell, Owen Bullock, Maggie Butt,Anne Caldwell, Vahni Capildeo, Anne Casey, Eileen Chong, Paul Cliff, Katharine Coles, Oliver Comins,Tricia Dearborn, Benjamin Dodds, Martin Dolan, Ross Donlon, Maura Dooley, Moira Egan, Niloofar Fanaiyan, D.W. Fenza, John Foulcher, Lisa Gorton, Samia Goudie, Philip Gross, Oz Hardwick, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Dominique Hecq,Matt Hetherington, Paul Hetherington, Andy Jackson, Jill Jones, Bella Li, Ian McMillan, Paul Mills, Helen Mort, Paul Munden, Nessa O'Mahony, Geoff Page, Alvin Pang, Renee Pettitt-Schipp, Mario Petrucci, Lucy Sheerman, Alex Skovron, Melinda Smith, Shane Strange, Keijiro Suga, James Sutherland-Smith, Jen Webb, River Wolton.

From the afterword:'All of us are wrapped in our stories-in the prosaic and exquisite, in ordinary moments and complex relationships, in our history and our present lives. We are clothed in hope and loss, in happiness and sorrow, in anger and fear, in love and yearning. We all wear the common garment of humanity.'

In this, his fifth full-sized collection, Paul Cliff evokes thecity of Canberra and surrounding region, where he has lived for the past 20 years. The poems work via characteristically wide-ranging moods and voice registers, from lyrical and elegiac to narrative and comic. They also deploy a variety of forms, from sonnets and odes to fables and epigrams, underlain by seductive rhythms and arresting metaphor. The capital’s festivals, institutions and monuments, everyday street life, suburbs, and lakescape are investigated, while the more distant terrains of Weereewa (Lake George), Namadgi, the Monaro, the Snowy Mountains, and the South Coast of New South Wales are also evoked in engaging and often striking terms.

The French social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is known for the richness and sophistication of his extensive writings. In these selected dialogues, under taken with Michael Grenfell in the 1980s and 1990s, he is in aconversational mood. Here, he reflects on both his life and the formation and signficance of his key concepts and perspectives. His statements are often direct and straight forward, and yet lose nothing in attesting againto the striking originality of his philosophy and method. Such elements of his work are then further elucidated in extensive annotations to the transcripts, which encourage the reader to follow up and explore some more.

These haiku were written over three summers, camping on our piece of land near Waihi in Aotearoa New Zealand, and, for contrast, one winter sojourn there in our newly-built gypsy wagon. The land is bordered by the Mataura stream-which means 'red face'. We call the place 'Land of the shining stream' or 'River's edge'.

Oz Hardwick’s collection of prose poems Learning to have lost  the passing of time, memory, old age, illness, death and how these resonate and move within and around each other . True to form, Hardwick achieves a sense of a musical refrain and rhythm underpinning and connecting this absorbing collection. While the subject matter is weighty and the pain from the litany of loss candidly expressed, a resolute humour asserts itself throughout that is sometimes sinister, sometimes surreal, often surprising and enormously engaging.

Sandra Renew's new poems interrogate the choices made in living and performing gender, sexuality and desire—of struggling to be queer in an Australia of Holden utes and rotting mangoes, XXXX stubbies and Bundy rum, boudoir drawers and country roads, toad princes and wanting to be Wesley Hall. It is a book of not wanting to conform,  charting the myriad pressures society places on conformity as a mode of survival. It is a brave, and sometimes funny book, filled with wry and deeply felt images and observations.

The emerging writers whose stories grace this collection engage in the play of symbolic action and detail, capturing sadness and imperfection through an apprehended fictional world-an abstracted reality. The stories resonate because they are intensely focused upon very particular forms of enquiry: Why do the characters see what they see? How do they know what they know? Perhaps it is this-the focus upon a very particular form of sensory apprehension-that lies at the heart of short stories that resonate beyond the final lines of text.The stories in ACE Anthology. Arresting, Contemporary stories by Emerging writers are authentic, the voices diverse and multilayered, translating longing, deprivation, and the raw senses of lived experience, into an urgency of ideas.Featuring:Supartra Walker, Joshua Kemp, Andrew Drummond, Alison Kelly, Sue Brennan, Ivana Rnjak, Sophie MacNeill, Ruth Armstrong, Kerrie Knox, Lisa Smithies.

‘Even the memories of memory are fading. It has been decades since this all began.’In Jen Webb’s hands, the prose poem is a fluid medium, alive with sharp glints and subtle eddies, and never uncontrolled... though it is a deceptive calm, nudged just beneath the surface by the force of the unsaid.— Philip Gross 

Matt Hetherington's new collection highlights his very unique way of breaking the world at large into subtle architectures of mystery and wonder. Hetherington is fascinated by finding the universal in the particular and the sublime in the vulgar, and wrapping it up in tight little packages of observation and feeling.

A new collection of poetry from the author of Transit.'no matter how deep within we travel there is still more to find—so that a tree can be a universe, an ocean a drop, and our planet an atom'

Through a concise analysis of interviews with 76 poets from around the world, Dr Monica Carroll and Distinguished Professor Jen Webb investigate the context of poetic excellence. The book examines these poets’ formativemoments, the role that key individuals and institutions play in their lives, and how they locate themselves within communities. The result is a fascinating picture of the rich context within which poetic creativity takes place.

Each reading of your palm a different roadverging from soil and forking into possibilitiesin a wild and foreign oceanno vaster than the line it makes with the skyIn The Many Uses of Mint Ravi Shankar resuscitates old poetic traditions while breathing new forms into life; he translates the ancients and collaborates with living artists and writers; and he peers through spirit at the secrets of the luminous universe. His work, over time, proves that by partaking of formalism, philosophical inquiry, musicality and play, language's wet clay can be shaped into artifacts of exceeding beauty and lasting resonance.

Ten contemporary women poets from Japan translated by a group of poets and translators.The aim of this project has been to translate or transform poems originally written in Japanese into poems that live and breathe as poems in English.Poetry from:ARAI TAKAKOISHIKAWA ITSUKOITO HIROMIHIRATA TOSHIKOKAWAGUCHI HARUMIKONO SATOKOMISAKI TAKAKOMISUMI MIZUKINAKAMURA SACHIKOYAMASAKI KAYOKO