Books published by Subbed in

blur by the is a collection of fractures that make not quite a whole. It is a giving of permission to the self, to exist as messily as ( i s ). These poems are a record of navigation through longing and dis [ place ] ment of the body and of place, a shattering of expectation(s) of the self and of family, often through dreams, food and eroticism. This is an attempt at freedom. blur by the is a yearning for freedom from grief, memory, and—ultimately—from definition.The form through which the poems take in blur by the is dancing-in-your-bedroom free, un-velcro-ed false bravado free. The poems eat a lot and hope to feed you too.

Mauritian culture is too often known for the dodo: an extinct, flightless bird who inhabited the island that died out during European colonisation. It is time to move forward and ensure our robust yet marginalised culture houses and projects all the diverse individual voices within it.HAUNT (THE KOOLIE) is poetry; a neo-Coolie meditation, exorcism of racial bigotry and satire of fear-mongering, from a decolonial Mauritian-Australian perspective.Suburban mainstream yachts grow, giantweeds in driveways, outlawgutter trophies, never seem toLike! Find water?But: I am Black enough to holdthe Whiteness in meon me and @-me, account without countinga graceless film-fade into seething lighthide colour, enlighten or diesettling, whiny-rewind VHS scores(At Aussie, we’ll save you!)

'Poetry is / can / be anything … everything,' says When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon. She is sleepy, but they cannot sleep. It is 4:44 a.m. loneliness, this restlessness. The soft hue of blue from the TV bathes the room via a 24/7 lo-fi livestream. ‘Poems are troubled into existence’ – When I die, she read that somewhere, but cannot remember where, but it has stayed, it is the underpinning of this book and all that contains with/in/out. Where did these bruises come from? The heart, the brain, the heart, the soul? How do I live? How do I keep on living? I don’t know, is the honest answer. I must, is the honest honest answer.

A wheeze is the sound air makes when it hits the constricted trachea, the sound of meat meeting air. wheeze is a collection of poems about the ghostly possession of the body. It's desire as a force and not a lack. It's Pazuzu from The Exorcist. It's compulsive journalling. It's the reading someone else's body language as a gothic form of divination. It's the dark art of crushing, when the consuming thought of that distant other person enters you through the windpipe like a second body.

Emily Crocker complicates home and family in her book, Girls and Buoyant. With sensitivity and wry observation, Crocker explores old suburbs and new loves at the intersections of intimate moments and where late capitalism pokes at our lives. Girls and Buoyant is a striking debut poetry collection as Crocker presents an unflinching examination of life outside the margins of the urbanised middle class.

Parenthetical Bodies by Alex Gallagher holds you close and says “it’s okay, things are weird”. These poems are about what it takes to be in and amongst bodies, to be loving and empathetic in the internet age, or to survive in a city being slowly crushed under the weight of its own housing bubble.Parenthetical Bodies explores queerness and transgressive bodies. Hope glimmers and shakes as Gallagher entwines tenderness and heartache, surfing dogs and estrogen pills. Gallagher’s debut collection is packed with writing that is instantly loveable and as eviscerating as it is gentle.

If you're sexy and you know it slap your hams is a darkly funny, irreverently angry, and stupidly erotic contemplation of what it means to be a person, especially a sexy person, especially a sexy fat person, with supple, slappable hams.This is a good book for bad people, no judgement. A good book of poems for people who like a procession of dogs’ dicks, bodily fluids, naked old ladies, groundhogs, asses, nose picking, depression and bisexual innuendo. A poetry collection like nothing else but actually like a lot of other things. Pushing the sad into the funny and back into the sad again, this book provides a portrait of a young human coping with a cruel and indifferent universe, love, life, mental illness, celebrity culture; and smizing all the way down. This poetry collection is a fat wet tongue writhing with pleasure and agony in the mouth of a culture overflowing with bad behaviour, worse intentions and even worse, smellier saliva. This book is like chicken soup for the soul, except someone misheard and they used chicken poop instead. And now they have chicken poop instead of a soul. Eloise Grills tears her time-space continuum a new one, slapping our sumptuous hams over and over; so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the arse.

The poems in The Hostage explore the give and take of desire, being taken by language, art, or a higher-power, and the curious drift of experience.The hostage rarely threatens the silence too, so as far as I can tell this is a good hostage, I say ‘you’re a really good hostage.’ 

The Naming by Aisyah Shah Idil is full of surprises as this remarkable collection pulls apart the threads of liminality and traces their paths across culture, family, and environment. Shah Idil’s experimental sense provides a transformative frame for an uncompromising lyricism, pushing outwards beyond the pages and prodding at the edges of memory and oblivion. Shah Idil’s poetry is magical and relentless, brimming with love.