Delighted to announce Like to the Lark and Willo Drummond’s stunning debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann) will be launched on Thursday 16th March at Marrickville Pavilion by award-winning poet and critic (and close friend) Felicity Plunkett, whose most recent collection is A Kinder Sea (UQP, 2020).

Really looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and reading some of these poems!

Tickets are free, but bookings are essential.

I loved talking with the ever-generous Rob McDonald about Like to the Lark (out now with Upswell Publishing), identity and writing, how to approach a poem and much more more for the Queer Writes Sessions Podcast.

You can catch the episode on SoundCloud.

Thanks again to Rob, Dani Vee, Jo Canham and Blarney Books.

Thanks to Prue Gibson and Amanda Lucas-Frith for including my poem ‘Wuray’ in The Herbarium Tales, a special issue of Plumwood Mountain, alongside beauties by Samuel Wagan Watson, Felicity Plunkett, Dakota Feirer, Michelle Cahill and Luke Patterson. This project ‘seeks to find out how plant-human connections have changed and asks what relevance herbarium collections hold in a changing world.’

You can read ‘Wuray’ here and the full issue here.

I’ve a duplex about the emu bush from its own point of view in Mascara Literary Review Issue 28 (thanks to eds Michelle Cahill, Anthea Yang, Monique Nair) and another, about trauma, The Tempest and transformation (tw: rape), in Antipodes 35.1 (thanks to ed Nathanael O’Reilly). 

Both poems also appear in Like to the Lark, out soon with Upswell Publishing. You can pre-order a copy here. 

What does an eight word story look like? What would an old church say if it could speak? How do you be a good gay in a small town? 

In Part 2 of Like to the Lark’s podcast episode (tw: sexual violence) Meesha Williams and I also talk about queering and querying language, perspectives on the moon, and how being a poet might affect your dating life. And I read another poem — ‘Moon’s Étude’ — from the collection. 

You can catch the episode on Spotify and on Apple. 

Thanks again to Meesha, Terri-ann White and Upswell Publishing. 

And just a reminder that you can pre-order Like to the Lark at Upswell‘s website where it’s flying solo and part of Upswell’s 2023 Poetry Subscription. 

You can also pre-order your copy at Angus & Robertson, Avenue Bookstore, Booktopia, Dymocks, Fullers Bookshop, Hares & Hyenas, The Nile, Paperback Bookshop and QBD. 

Loved chatting with the brilliant Meesha Williams for the brand-new Upswell Podcast series.

In Part 1 we talk about Like to the Lark‘s origins, forms, experiments, subversions and queerings plus I read some poems — ‘In Heaven I‘ll be quite normal (or, Pentina to Doone Kennedy, after The Smiths)‘ and ‘Duplex‘ (In the beginning I was a house). 

You can catch the episode on Spotify and on Apple. 

At the end of Like to the Lark is Notes on Form in which I write about music, sound, form and transformation, all of which underpin the collection. Thanks to Felicity Plunkett for suggesting and editing the piece and to Terri-ann White for supporting and reproducing it at Upswell‘s website.

And just a reminder that you can pre-order Like to the Lark at Upswell‘s website where it’s flying solo and part of Upswell’s 2023 Poetry Subscription. 

Happy to have new poems in Australian Poetry Journal 12.1 ‘divergence, relevance‘, guest-edited by Scott-Patrick Mitchell and Esther Ottaway, and Issue 5 of Authora Australis, a terrific new literary journal edited by Roger Patulny, Carlo Caponecchia and Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad.

‘At Seven Mile Beach‘ appears in APJ, which you can order here, and ‘Two Views of Rockhampton’ and ‘From the City to the Country’ appear in AA, which you can read here.

‘At Seven Mile Beach‘ also appears in Like to the Lark, out February 2, 2023 with Upswell Publishing. You can pre-order LttL here.

And stay tuned for some exciting news …

Like to the Lark went to print two weeks ago with an ever so slightly revised cover by Chil3’s Becky and Betty and very lovely words by Ali Alizadeh, Natalie Harkin, A. Frances Johnson, Kate Lilley, Anthony Lynch and Maria Takolander which I can’t wait to share with you.

You can pre-order the book here where it’s flying solo and a part of Upswell Publishing’s 2023 Poetry Subscription.

It’s a buzz to see the book available for pre-order at Fullers Bookshop and Hares & Hyenas, homes away from home when I lived in Hobart and Melbourne, as well as at Angus & Robertson, Avenue Bookstore, Booktopia, Dymocks and QBD.

Huge thanks to dream team Terri-ann White (my publisher) and Felicity Plunkett (my editor), to the blurb writers (especially Nat, Amanda, Kate and Anthony) and to bio/logical family.

Belated happy publication day to Admissions: Voices within Mental Health, released yesterday!

This anthology, edited by David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury and Mohammad Awad, includes poems, essays, lyrics, fiction and illustrations by Claire Albrecht, Eunice Andrada, Pascalle Burton, Josie/Jocelyn Deane, Shastra Deo, Quinn Eades, Chris Fleming, Alan Fyfe, Andrew Galan, Anna Jacobson, Kate Lilley, Chris Lynch, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Sara M. Saleh, Ellen van Neerven and many more. I’m grateful my poem ‘Sestina: Rape’ is a part of it.

The book will be launched in Melbourne on October 7, in Sydney on October 13 and in Brisbane on October 20.

Admissions is out with Upswell Publishing and can be ordered here.

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.’