Jack Oats (aka Baker) is a man of all trades. Under various pseudonyms, he has been a teacher, ornithologist, conservation biologist, bureaucrat, father, grandfather and husband. He has published lots of science and years ago, he managed Biodiversity Conservation Science for the NSW Department of Environment and Conservation. Nowadays, Jack Oats makes short fictional and factual word creations as part of the Recovery Plan for the Semi-colon. In this, his first published collection of poetr...

A fascinating prize-winning novel about a house with a fanciful little turret, built by a river. Unfolding within its rooms are lives of event and emotional upheaval. A lot happens. And the tumultuous events of the twentieth century also leave their mark, from war to economic collapse, the deaths of presidents and princesses to new waves of music, art, architecture and political ideas. Meanwhile, a few metres away in the river, another creature follows a d...

‘Things I Did for Money is a collection of exciting and imaginative stories from one of our most innovative writers. This is a book for readers hungry for a highly original voice.’ — Tony BirchA man’s fury at his neighbour is reversed by strange nightmares. A young woman with a grudge finds a discarded weapon. A hunt for sunken treasure brings two scuba divers to the brink of tragedy.Drawing us into worlds both surreal and familiar, Things I Di...

A brand new story from the author of The Grand Hotel.Rural Victoria 1865, the heat comes in and all the signs of the next drought on its way. At times like these no one seems to mind putting on their best clothes and making the long journey to the cool, bluestone church on a Sunday morning. but it is not only humans seeking shelter and solace on this Sunday morning.

This book is an ode to the fragrant, yet rough-hewn Australian bush. By delving into its pages, you will be transported to a parallel realm where flannel flowers sing, cockatoos choreograph and paperbark trees seduce. A memoir of sorts, this poignant and ethereal collection of poems celebrates the beauty, the harshness and the resilience of this ancient land and its unforgettable inhabitants.In addition, you’ll be serenaded by harps and fairies, meander through time in a yellow din...

'The Fringe, Poetry Cafe' is an anthology from poets based in the North West of England. Some of this work has appeared in poetry pamphlets distributed in pubs, cafes, libraries, shops, buses and trains. In fact, anywhere the public may have time to read some interesting pieces of writing. There are many prize winning poems here. The pamphlets and ebooks are published by SeaQuake Books. The idea behind the initiative is to bring poetry to a wider audience. The poets included in this partic...

Urgent and precarious, the poems in The Rapids, Susan Gillis’ third collection, take us to places lost and reclaimed: a balcony high over the St. Lawrence River in downtown Montreal, upstream to the Lachine Rapids, and beyond, to landscapes as far apart as Greece and the B.C. coast.

For a long time, people have looked to science as a way to understand their own lives. But while science has proven itself a useful metaphor, it has just as often been exposed as being as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. Newcomer Leigh Kotsilidis's lively, thoughtful and refreshingly speculative first collection engages and questions the linguistic roots of the hypothetical, both as they apply to the Scientific Method and its faith in certainty, and tothe word's alternate mean...

Terse and concise or rambling and hypnotic, poetry finds the music in language. Building pictures from sound, layering obvious over oblique on obscure, it secretes multiple levels of meaning for the seeking. If a picture is worth a thousand words the goal of a single word is to create a whirl of images. Reducing, condensing, saying more with less: making music in the flow of the words.

In his debut collection of poems Neil Boyack’s Self Help and Other Works digs deep into the trials of loyalty, the stink of lust, and the wounds of solitude. Boyack’s commitment to vulnerability is there for all to see and judge, as is his way. Heavily based in the operational and everyday he finds the hidden and the secret in the self deceptions and the anonymity of the dead fox, roads as long as sight, an argument on the beach, and in the ironies of a white Australia with a bla...

Sue Sinclair is the direct inheritor of the great early 20th Century German poet, Rilke: she possesses intense lyrical vision, steeped in wonder at the existence of the world, and a kind of grief at our inability to lose ourselves in it completely. Her perception is acutely focused and rigorous; and she is acutely self-aware. She is not afraid of words like “beauty” or “being,” yet, because of the intensity of her vision, she never uses them as clichés. Her gift for metaphor is astonishing...

Poems 1988-1998 is a compendium from Jo Shapcott's award-winning books Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep. It reveals her to be a writer of ingenious, politically acute and provocative imagination and justifies her reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation.