I’m excited to share the cover of Like To The Lark, my second poetry collection, out February 2, 2023 with Upswell Publishing!

Huge thanks to my publisher Terri-ann White and my editor Felicity Plunkett, and to Chil3’s Becky Chilcott and Betty Joy Richards for cover design (cover photo by moi).

I’d be stoked if you’d consider pre-ordering at Booktopia or, a bit later this year, Upswell Publishing.

‘Like To The Lark is Stuart Barnes’s poetic Back to Mine, an accumulation of lifetime fascinations with music and sound, form and transformation. Beginning with an apparition of a doomed world brooding over itself and ending with a kvelling globe, this long-awaited second collection from the winner of the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize plunges—‘What a plunge!’ (‘What a lark!’)—into seas, scoots across countries and hurtles towards space. Ghazal shapeshifts into pantoum, duplex, sonnet, sestina, terminal, Golden Shovel and more plus two new forms invented by Barnes—terse-set and flashbang. As influenced by popular culture as they are by classical mythology, these poems—by turns playful, serious, tender, bold, surprising and witty—are fearless in their explorations of rape, illness, death, remembrance, ecology, love and joy. While ‘Fog / and Grief preen’ over a serodiscordant gay couple, a phoenix-like Royal Poinciana declares ‘My breath is rooted in kindness’. Forged from and framed by conversations with Nick Drake, Gwen Harwood, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Robert Smith and others, Barnes’s poems sparkle with vivid lyricism and wild inventiveness, and summon great care for the way they tend and transmute trauma and illuminate the resilience of human and non-human beings.’

Thanks to guest editors Jo Langdon and Cam Lowe for including my poem ‘Moon’s Étude’ in Cordite’s OPEN issue alongside beauties by Felicity Plunkett, Dave Drayton, Jill Jones, Bella Li, Autumn Royal, Kirli Saunders, Michelle Cahill, Josie/Jocelyn Deane, Lisa Collyer, Luoyang Chen, Dani Netherclift, Debbie Lim, Dan Hogan, Maddie Godfrey, Liam Ferney, Ali Jane Smith, Kerry Greer, Natalie D-Napoleon, Sam Morley, Laura Jean McKay, Damen O’Brien, Izzy Roberts-Orr, Lisa Gorton and many, many more.

You can read ‘Moon’s Étude’ here and the full issue here.

Thanks to Mark Ward for including my prose poem ‘GRINDR’ in the latest issue of Impossible Archetype alongside writing by Lorelei Bacht, Joshua Barnes, Ben Kline, Raymond Luczak, Eric Norris, Ann Pedone, Cyril Wong and many more.

You can download the issue here.

Happy to have a poem in Rabbit ARCHITECTURE, guest-edited by Ella Jeffery. 

My ‘Duplex’ is a duplex (a form invented by Jericho Brown) about a duplex and appears alongside writing by Adam Aitken, joanne burns, Lisa Collier, Josie/Jocelyn Deane, Liam Ferney, Zenobia Frost, Aiden Heung, Rebecca Jessen, Jill Jones, Jake Goetz, Damen O’Brien and many more. 

You can order a copy of the issue, launching at Brisbane’s Avid Reader on July 25, here. 

My poem ‘Triolet on Receiving Email from C’ has been published in Southerly 79.3: The Way We Live Now, edited by Melissa Hardie and Kate Lilley. This issue also includes new work by Pam Brown, Pascalle Burton, Dave Drayton, Angela Gardner, Elena Gomez, Dan Hogan, Rebecca Jessen, A. Frances Johnson and Anthony Lynch, Jill Jones, Harold Legaspi, Beth Spencer, Catherine Vidler, Alison Whittaker and many, many more.

You can read my poem here and the full issue (free and online, with the assistance of Create NSW) here.

My poem ‘How to Be a Good Gay in a Small Town’ appears in Westerly 67.1. This issue also includes new work by Jarad Bruinstroop, Nathan Curnow, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Pidj Flavell, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Jo Langdon, Jurate Sasnaitis, Brenda Saunders, Rita Tognini and many, many more.

You can order a copy of Westerly here.

Pleased to have a poem in forthcoming anthology Admissions: Voices within Mental Health (eds David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury, Mohammad Awad) alongside writing by John Mukky Burke, Pascalle Burton, Shastra Deo, Quinn Eades, Chris Fleming, Anna Jacobson, Kate and Rozanna Lilley, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Ellen van Neerven and many more.

Out October 3 through wonderful Upswell Publishing, but you can pre-order your copy here.

Happy to have a concrete poem after The Cure in Overland 245 alongside writing by Wayne Marshall, Mykaela Saunders, Anders Villani, Corey Wakeling, Dženana Vucic and many more.

Thanks to poetry editor Toby Fitch for selecting ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, which borrows its title from The Cure song of the same name.

You can order a copy of the issue here.

Island 164 is out now and includes my poem ‘Sestina after B. Carlisle’, which won the 2021/22 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and the poems by runners-up Andrew Sutherland (‘Antarctica’) and John Foulcher (‘The Girls Become’). The issue also includes fiction by Eliza Henry-Jones (‘The Wolves’), nonfiction by Lesh Karan (‘Mera Pata’) and nine poems from The More Than Human Poetry Project. 

You can order your copy of Island 164 here. 

Happy to have poems in three new anthologies. 

‘travel ban’, shortlisted for the Newcastle Writers Festival joanne burns Microlit Award, has been published in Travel: An Anthology of Microlit (ed. Cassandra Atherton) alongside writing by Emma Ashmere, Seetha Nambiar Dodd, Anne Elvey, Dominique Hecq, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Bahar Razaghi, Beth Spencer et al. You can order your copy of Travel here.

‘Off-world Ghazal’ has been published in Australian Poetry Anthology Volume 9, 2021–2022 (eds Lucy Dougan, Michelle Cahill), alongside poems by Magdalena Ball, Jarad Bruinstroop, Derek Chan, Rico Craig, Angela Gardner, Claire Gaskin, Stu Hatton, Harold Legaspi, Jill Jones, Kaya Ortiz, Heather Taylor-Johnson et al. 

‘Off-world Ghazal’, ‘The morning fog’ (A Golden Shovel after Kate Bush), ‘Hamlet without the Prince’ and ‘The Being’ have been published in The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Poetry (eds Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington) alongside poems by Jordie Albiston, Merlinda Bobis, joanne burns, Judith Nangala Crispin, David Eggleton, Felicity Plunkett, Essa May Ranapiri, Gig Ryan, Chris Tse, Samuel Wagan Watson, Jessica L. Wilkinson et al. You can order your copy of The Language in My Tongue, described by Marjorie Perloff as ‘remarkable for its exuberance, its vitality, and the notably youthful vibrancy of its free verse as well as its innovative prose poetry,’ here.  

Some exciting news — my poem ‘Sestina after B. Carlisle’ has won the 2021/22 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize!

Thanks to judges Kate Middleton, Ali Alizadeh and Aidan Coleman and everyone at Island Magazine. Special thanks to friends who read and commented on the poem. You can read Kate Middleton’s comments here.

Congratulations to runners-up Andrew Sutherland and John Foulcher (our poems will appear in Island 164, out soon) and highly commendeds Kay Are and Roland Leach (theirs will appear in Island 165). You can subscribe to Island here.