More Poetry Collections We Can’t Wait to Read in 2021
If your poetry TBR pile is starting to look a little thin, never fear - we’ve got you covered! These are some recent and upcoming poetry releases that are simply not to be missed.
From well-known and loved voices such as Tony Birch, to the highly anticipated first collection from Jazz Money (and several other exciting newcomers), there’s something for everyone to explore.
Whisper Songs by Tony Birch
Lyrical and intimate, Whisper Songs draws readers into tender conversations between Birch and those he loves, or has loved. Divided into three parts - Blood, Skin and Water - Birch addresses vital themes of loss, people and place, colonial history and violence, and the empowering relationship between Country and memory. The collection includes documents from his own family history, through which he challenges and interrogates the archive of what is known and what is left out - forcefully highlighting how the personal is intensely political. Stunningly emotive from a beloved storyteller, this is not to be missed.
Release Date: June 2021
Publisher: UQP Books
the moment, taken by Jennifer Compton
In her eleventh collection of poetry, Jennifer Compton has “yielded to the absolute lure of eidetic memory - 'relating to or denoting images having unusual vividness and detail as if actually visible.'” An imaginative and evocative foray into the damage, drama, tableau and truth of life, Compton’s latest collection is imbued with a lifelong joy of writing poetry for pleasure.
Release Date: June 2021
Publisher: Recent Work Press
Sydney Spleen by Toby Fitch
This latest collection comes from a mainstay of the Sydney poetry scene. Toby Fitch uses Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the spleen as melancholy and combines it with a contemporary sense of irony to articulate modern causes of doom and gloom. Set against the backdrop of Sydney and its screens, Fitch utilises a radical use of form and tone to create a collection that is “as much an aesthetic experience as a literary one.” Tackling big concepts such as climate change, disaster capitalism, neo-colonialism, fake news, fascism, and how to raise kids in a world fast becoming obsolete, this is a powerful collection that finds the balance between gloom and humour, distance and connection.
Release Date: July 2021
Publisher: Giramondo
Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Carepack by Ann Vickery
Taking its cue from Leonardo da Vinci’s observation that bees do not simply collect and use but also digest and transform, Ann Vickery’s latest collection considers how our understanding of social interactions might “borrow from those of the more-than-human.” With a decidedly feminist approach, Vickery explores experiences of intimacy and labour and how cultural hierarchies and divisions have shaped gender, racism, capital and nation. “Funny, fierce and simmering,” Vickery uses the poetic form to ask central questions around how we can learn from our natural world and reorient our knowledge more ethically to face our current future.
Release Date: July 2021
Publisher: Vagabond Press
Gravidity and Parity by Eleanor Jackson
A collection to be read by anyone who “was mothered/is mothered/does mothering. By every body that has held another body within it,” Eleanor Jackson’s newest collection bravely explores the narratives surrounding pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and early motherhood against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using bleak humour, crisp language and a fundamental desire to explore the space between what we are told and what is left unsaid, Jackson dives deep into the “natal taboo,” offering a new celebration of everything strange, mourned, connected and disconnected through the early motherhood experience.
Release Date: July 2021
Publisher: Vagabond Press
Theory of Colours by Bella Li
Bella Li’s third collection, Theory of Colours, takes its title from the influential nineteenth-century treatise on colour by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Moving from the distant past, through the unstable present and into speculative futures, Li uses colour and its absence as subject, principle and medium to explore various visual and thematic conventions. Ghost stories, westerns and science fiction narratives converge through text and image, as Li delivers a startling and unsettling reading experience of “sequence and time, absence and haunting.”
Release Date: August 2021
Publisher: Vagabond Press
How to Make a Basket by Jazz Money
“Simmering with protest and boundless love,” Jazz Money’s awaited David Unaipon Award-winning collection examines the tensions of contemporary living within the Australian colony. Scathing, funny and lyrical, Money celebrates Blak and queer love while simultaneously using her words as an “extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state.” Described as fiercely political, Money’s powerful voice demands a revision of Australia’s ‘known’ history. Writing in both Wiradjuri and English, Money explores place, bodies and memory, and “the ways our ancestors walk with us, speak through us and wait for us.”
Release Date: August 2021
Publisher: UQP Books
Animals With Human Voices by Damen O’Brien
In the debut collection of poetry from award-winning poet Damen O’Brien, you’ll be met with worms who dream of god, a powerless Superman, the truth about Elvis and jellyfish weary of immortality. With a cinematic eye, unique, witty voice and deep love of nature, O’Brien delivers a reading experience that are “ciphers for the normal concerns of every human,” not least, love, life and death.
Release Date: September 2021
Publisher: Recent Work Press
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online at www.wordswithelaine.com.
