Books published by Recent Work Press

In this debut collection, Judith Wright Poetry Prize winner, K A Nelson surveys a life lived in inland Australia. Inlandia traces the inner self, recording discoveries as she feels the place out and comes to an understanding of what 'place' means. Nelson's direct poetry makes us think again about what keeps us returning, physically and in memory, to the terrains and people who occupy our shared history.

1962. Menzies was in power, Whitlam was deputy Opposition Leader, and the cold war was in full swing. Canberra was steadily transforming froma town in a paddoc to a city with a lake. This is a year in the life of the building that held all the action: Old Parliament House. One of the outcomes of a collaborative project between poet Melinda Smith and artist Caren Florance, this poetic work is an exercise in re-voicing the past and placing it in conversation with the present.

Cavorting with Time is a series of poems about female ageing and mortality. Jacqui Malins shares them here as a work in progress, a script that will develop and mature over time, gathering notes and annotations with each new presentation. She has performed variations of it solo, with musical accompaniment, and now it performs on the page. In this sequence of poems, Jacqui Malins negotiates andrenegotiates her relationship with time and its effects on the bodyand mind. Time is a complex presence: variously a musician, adance partner, a tattooist, an adversary to be gripped and wrestled,the turner of a cosmic crankhandle, a pair of cupped hands waitingto catch us at the end of consciousness, and more. Malins bearsclear-eyed and nuanced witness to the ravages and caresses of ourconstant companion, 'Time, our sister' while gazing calmly at'Death, who walks with her.' An experience you will not forget.Melinda SmithWinner, 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry

Tract is the third anthology of prose poems from the Prose Poetry Project, a group of overtwenty poets from across Australia, Singapore, and the UK who collaborate on writing inthis fl uid form. This anthology features two sequences of prose poems: one characterisedby the single moment; the other refl ecting longer durations. Placed on opposing pages,the conversation between the two echoes the vibrant and enduring poetic practice ofthis group.

In Owen Bullock’s second haiku sequence with Recent Work Press, he explores the wisdom garnered from his period as a care worker for the elderly in New Zealand. These haiku display the riches of Bullock’s keen sense of observation married with his ability to get to the essence of any subject with his deft use of this most precise of Japanese forms.

Owen Bullock's haiku sequence Urban Haiku  delivers a world with deft subtlety and cutting precision.  Each of these poems  builds on the last  to deliver a strong sense of place and of people. Urban Haiku has an eye for the absurdities of contemporary life, as well as its quieter, less noticed moments.

Pulse is the second anthology of prose poems from the Prose Poetry Project, a group of over twenty poets from across Australia and the UK who collaborate on writing this most undecidable of forms. This anthology features two long  sequences of prose poems, selected to resonate  images, themes, ideas and connections.  What develops is an immersive, multi-vocal reading experience that speaks to not only the collaborative nature of the project but to prose poetry's capacity to surprise and delight.

Written as an experiment in a weekend and inspired by a paratext from Clarice Lispector, 'Notes to the Reader' is a collection of twenty-one calls to readers from books and authors long forgotten.

Miranda Lello's debut collection of poetry is a deeply felt and often playful reflection on the liminal moments of contemporary life.  Influenced by poets such as Walt Whitman, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Sylvia Plath, Lello's keen eye searches out the possibilities of new worlds as they exist in the everyday moments of work,  of journeys, of love, and of  living.   This is a collection written on the body and mind and invested in the possibility of poetry to make us feel.

In this essay Professor Ronald Schleifer makes the case that the humanities train us in systematic attention to experience – and in particular, attention to linguistic and narrative knowledge – and he shows how this kind of attention can change the fundamental quality andoutcome of interactions in the domainof medicine. 

Paul Hetherington's long prose poem Íkaros crafts from the myth of the same name, a unique inspiration and imagination spanning multiple layers of time and consciousness, incorporating memory and dreamscapes into an exceptionally potent exploration of a journey through to self-awareness. Central to the myth of Íkaros and to this collection is the relationship between father and son portrayed by Hetherington with exquisite honesty and tenderness, at once explorative and elegiac. His vision's complexity is expressed in clear, honed language, its fresh imagery enabling a rare and compassionate depth of insight. This is a painterly, highly visual and visceral work with compelling underlying cadences and rhythms. Hetherington gifts the reader with "a necklace of words; utterances like waves and beach-tossed stones" and a telling capacity to listen closely and to see clearly.

In AD 8, Publius Ovidius Naso, the poet Ovid, was exiled from Rome by emperor Augustus for composing verses that touched on scandal in the imperial court. Famously grief-stricken, he burnt his manuscript of what would become one of the world's most celebrated anthologies of verse tales, Metamorphoses, which only survived because his friends circulated their copies of it. To celebrate Ovid's 2,000th anniversary, 100 poets were invited to respond to Metamorphoses with new poems that explore the many contemporary resonances in that seminal work.Contributors:Patience Agbabi, Amina Alyal, Steve Armstrong, Cassandra Atherton, Tony Barnstone, Jean Bleakney, Merlinda Bobis, Christian Bök, Robyn Bolam, Kevin Brophy, David Butler, Maggie Butt, Anne Caldwell, Kimberley Campanello, Siobhán Campbell, Vahni Capildeo, Monica Carroll, Eileen Chong, Jane Clarke, Katharine Coles, Oliver Comins, Stephanie Conn, Enda Coyle Greene, Catherine Ann Cullen, Colin Dardis, Kate Dempsey, Moyra Donaldson, Katie Donovan, Moira Egan, Luke Fischer, Anne Fitzgerald, Rose Flint, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Tess Gallagher, Peggie Gallagher, Mark Granier, Philip Gross, Phillip Hall, Oz Hardwick, Susan Hawthorne, Dominique Hecq, Paul Hetherington, Eleanor Hooker, Subhash Jaireth, Judy Johnson, Fred Johnston, Matt Kirkham, Kent MacCarter, Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Paul Maddern, Steven Matthews, Kevin McCann, Iggy McGovern, Maria McManus, Paul Mills, Geraldine Mitchell, David Morley, Graham Mort, Paul Munden, Kate Newmann, Doireann Ní Ghriofa, Jean O'Brien, Clairr O'Connor, Mary O'Donnell, John O'Donnell, John O'Donoghue, Nessa O'Mahony, Maeve O'Sullivan, Alvin Pang, Pauline Plummer, Florin Dan Prodan, Craig Raine, Nell Regan, Paisley Rekdal, Mark Roper, Miles Salter, John W. Sexton, Ravi Shankar, Peter Sirr, Melinda Smith, Elizabeth Smither, Damian Smyth, Shane Strange, Keijiro Suga, George Szirtes, David Tait, Gráinne Tobin, Csilla Toldy, Jessica Traynor, Mark Tredinnick, Mark Vessey, Breda Wall Ryan, Jen Webb, Grace Wells, Nerys Williams, Anthony Wilson, Joseph Woods, Máiríde Woods, Enda Wyley, Jane Yeh

Isolation is a state of pleasing discordance. Nothing must. Not needs. Not want. It is a state of below-belly desire—not groinal, nor lustful, but where the world smacks into the mind of its own.Two friends—one in the country, one in distress—communicate throughout Monica Carroll's strangely compelling Isolator, a book of puzzles and performances, and screams in the night.