Obligations of Voice

Literature & Fiction

Elvey, Anne

Poetry

Recent Work Press

In Animals with Human Voices you will find worms that dream of god, jellyfish weary of immortality, a powerless Superman, some illogical observations on aliens', a lightning conductor tired of lightning and the truth about Elvis. In multi award-winning poet Damen O'Brien's debut collection, his cinematic eye and love of nature deliver poems which are ciphers for the normal concerns of every human: love, life and death and what we leave behind.

Animals with Human Voices

O'Brien, Damen

Imagine if six famous protagonists transcended chronological and geographical barriers to come together through a poetry group in Adelaide. Rhymes with Hyenas is an inventive narrative of emails and poetry that gives a female voice to characters originally written by men. They are Ursula from DH Lawrence's Women in Love, Caddy from Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Melanie from Coetzee's Disgrace, Delores from Nabokov's Lolita, Katherina from Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, and Lilith from Hebrew mythology.\nIn a poignant ode to literature and Adelaide, these women are whole, complex characters, sometimes up to their breasts in mothering, sometimes homesick for exiled lands. 'They are lecturers, dog owners, art makers and carers who deal with illness, infertility, addiction and abuse. Their stories, initially limited by the masterpieces that spawned them, continue on: they are not a closed book. 
In a vibrant commentary on literary patriarchy and the patriarchy beyond, this book considers the place of writing, critiquing, reading, performing and publishing poetry in a woman's space.

Rhymes with Hyenas

Taylor Johnson, Heather

I am the glass 
with all this inside 
my transparent walls 
the sun 
the moon 
the bubbles 
all this intoxication\nPenny Drysdale invites readers into her home and her transience as her relationship begins to end. It is never easy to get on with your life. I am the glass is window into these tender invisible journeys. We watch her enchanted gestation.

I am the glass

Drysdale, Penny

2021 is the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, author of the long narrative poetic trilogy, The Divine Comedy. In a time of global pandemic, Dante's exploration of the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds and humankind's responsibilities to each other seems particularly relevant, and to commemorate Dante's anniversary we invited 70 poets from around the world to respond to Dante's famous work, assisted by a team of seven contributing editors: Paul Munden (UK), Nessa O'Mahony (Ireland), Paul Hetherington (Australia), Alvin Pang (Singapore), Priya Sarukkai Chabria (India), Moira Egan (Italy) and David Fenza (US).

Divining Dante

White Clouds Blue Rain

Driscoll, Oliver

Literary

Five Ages

Hetherington, Paul

Atherton, Cassandra

Hardwick, Oz

Beginning in Sight

Ell, Theodore

Our Ways on Earth

Bakowski, Peter

With stunning formal range and architectural design, Anders Villani's second collection explores how violence engenders selfhood by calling it into radical question. What does it mean to suffer in a body that also symbolises power? How can poetry, alert to the 'blur' and the 'panorama', trace this moral dissonance at its subtlest and most intimate? How do notions of illness and recovery, victim and perpetrator, rest on fraught archetypes, and what alternate understandings emerge when these foundations waver? Villani roves between myth, confession, narrative, and dream to address such questions-not abstractly, but through the experiences of a subject whose capacity to love and be loved is at stake. 
Novelistic in arc and scope, lyrically sensuous and searching, Totality invites readers on a journey of self-inquiry that dredges new channels in the contemporary poetics of trauma. As secrets reveal and conceal themselves, through the crucible of hypermasculinity, and with unstinting compassion, Villani's poems venture an expansive and timely music.

Totality

Villani, Anders

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Books by Recent Work Press