Over. The. Moon.

My second poetry collection Like To The Lark will be published by Upswell in February 2023!

I’m thrilled to be working with the lovely Terri-ann White. Huge thanks to Terri-ann, friends and family.

I can’t wait to share this really personal book, dedicated to the memory of my friend Sandy Mitchell, with you.

To look at Upswell Publishing’s brilliant list click here.

To listen to my Like To The Lark Spotify playlist click here.

Thanks to guest editors Elena Gomez and Sarah Gory and managing editor Kent MacCarter for including my poem ‘Duplex’ — about Neomarica gracilis (Walking iris) — in Cordite‘s AMBLE issue alongside beauties by Lachlan Brown, Angela Gardner, Jake Goetz, Ashley Haywood, Cameron Lowe, Sarah Temporal, Samuel Wagan Watson, Rae White, Cyril Wong and many others.

‘Duplex’ will also appear in my second poetry collection Like To The Lark, out through Upswell Publishing in February 2023.

You can read the full issue here.

A privilege to be a part of Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours, which ‘shares and celebrates the fascinating life stories of everyday Australians, including First Nations elders and migrants, and is based on one-on-one interviews with over forty participants’. The anthology is edited by Jessica L. Wilkinson and Cassandra Atherton, with Preface by Sarah Holland-Batt.

For this project I drank cuppas and chatted with two dear friends, Noel and Vallis, who live in Rockhampton, Central Queensland, then wrote the poems ‘NO-VA-MA-LE-A’ and ‘Just Between You and Me’. Thrilled these appear alongside poems by Carolyn Abbs, Ali Alizadeh, Cassandra Atherton, Lachlan Brown, Eileen Chong, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Aidan Coleman, Paul Hetherington, Siobhan Hodge, Jeanine Leane, Leni Shilton, Ben Walter, Nick Whittock and Jess Wilkinson.

You can order your copy of Memory Book here.

Loved guest-editing Australian Poetry Journal 11.1 ‘local, attention’ with the wonderful Claire Gaskin (whose latest collection, Ismene’s Survivable Resistance, is also out now, through Puncher & Wattmann).

This issue of APJ includes poems by Merlinda Bobis, Lachlan Brown, Gavin Yuan Gao, Keri Glastonbury, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Kristin Hannaford, Dominique Hecq, Matt Hetherington, Jill Jones, Felicity Plunkett, Beth Spencer, Prithvi Varatharajan, Dženana Vucic, Rae White and Jessica L. Wilkinson etc.

You can read the full Contents and our Foreword here and order your copy here.

This month’s VOLTA POETRY is heading ONLINE. The event will be livestreamed on the Queensland Poetry Facebook page, August 6 from 6:00pm. Looking forward to reading new poems and poems from Glasshouses. Love to see you there!

Looking forward to reading poems from Glasshouses and new poems in Brisbane next month.

Friday August 6, 5:55–7pm, Brisbane Square Library’s End Room. FREE event, bookings essential. Love to see you there!

So pleased my poem ‘Duplex’ (HIV Used to Be a Death Sentence) is in the summer issue of Poetry Wales, which you can pre-order here, alongside writing by Mary Jean Chan, Kate Clanchy, Hannah Lowe, Helen Mort and Marvin Thompson et al.

Thanks to editor Zoë Brigley for including this one, which takes its first line from an article published in TIME on World AIDS Day 2016.

The duplex is a wonderful form—‘a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem’—invented by American poet Jericho Brown. Jericho says more about the duplex here. You can read his ‘Duplex’ (A poem is a gesture toward home) here.

Thanks to editors Judith Nangala Crispin and PS Cottier for including my poem ‘Delonix regia (Royal Poinciana)’ in The Canberra Times, April 2021. To listen to Nat King Cole’s swirling version of ‘Poinciana (Song Of The Tree)’ click here.

Island Magazine recently launched a fab new website. I’m delighted my poem ‘Sonnet 29’, for dear Sandy Mitchell, is a part of the relaunch, alongside wonderful poems by Felicity Plunkett, Jill Jones, Cassandra Atherton, Jo Langdon, Ellen van Neerven, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Anne Kellas, Pete Hay, Sarah Day, Eileen Chong, Toby Fitch, Gavin Yates, A Frances Johnson, Yaaran Ellis, Chloe Wilson, Judith Beveridge, Graham Akhurst, Damen O’Brien, Jake Goetz, Belinda Rule, Ouyang Yu and Stephen Edgar + fiction, nonfiction and arts features.

You can read ‘Sonnet 29’ here and explore Island’s new website here.

Marie Ponsot, who invented the tritina, described the small form as ‘the square root of the sestina’.

Thanks to editors Angela Gardner, Carmen Leigh Keates and Kerry Kilner for including my poems ‘Tritina after Sartre’ and ‘Bone Scan’ (a blackout poem after Gwen Harwood’s ‘Bone Scan’) in foam:e Issue 17, alongside writing by Jennifer Compton, Jake Goetz, Stu Hatton, Rose Hunter, A. Frances Johnson, Anthony Lynch, Thuy On, Shane Strange and Janet Jiahui Wiu, among others.

You can read the full issue here.