Newly published

Bogdan Vulpe's empire is ruled with an iron fist. No one disobeys. That had been his way in Romania; so why should the City of Melbourne be any different?

Killing Justice leads you into a world of unbridled violence. Murder, extortion and anything else that Volpe needs to succeed will be used. If he has to take retribution against officers of the highest court in the land, so be it.

This latest challenge to Tony Signorotto and his loyal team is his toughest yet. Not only is he battling a violent criminal gang, but changes in the ranks of his beloved Carlton police force will pit him against an ambitious, careerist police Superintendent more interested in glory than justice. The fight to uphold the laws of the State continue in the gripping fourth instalment of Phil Copsey's Tony Signorotto crime series.

Living Fossils are the Happiest Kind is a rare collection: it is both deeply thoughtful and hugely thought provoking. It is written with a masterly poetic skill: spare, exact, clever. It selects its subjects from among the most urgent problems facing our world, and it treats them with an astonishing mixture of scientific understanding, humour, compassion, and just a hint of world weariness.

But this is no dry, didactic diatribe. The entire collection is infused with the poet's love of the natural world, his fascination and frustration with our own species, and a richly humorous outlook which elevates the whole collection with a gentle optimism.

Two Tongue World is a richly evocative collection of poems by the Greek/Australian poet, Maria Koukouvas. Sub titled, The Diaspora Dialogues, the poems are indeed a dialogue between past and present, between the cultures of origin and upbringing, between the generations of a family.

Deeply personal, these poems will strike a chord with everyone affected by the migrant experience and will enlighten and enthral those who have not had to live through the upheaval of migration. Koukouva unflinchingly confronts the pain and exhultation of growing up in the baffling world of the new migrant. She chronicles her growing up at once enveloped and estranged from the culture of her origin, the pain of trying to fit into a new world, and the maturation of a love and acceptance of the cultures, new and old, which have shaped her.

This is an important collection. Koukouvas brings a wonderfully sharp observation to her poems. They are at once clever, poignant, loving, enraged, joyful, and profound.

Adrian Harte's poetry collection is a startling and intense exploration of the poet in his world, with poems of humour, love, violence, trauma. Harte dissects and examines life with honesty and courage and a baffled outrage at the inhumanity of much of the modern world.

Richly evocative, Red Rite Hand is a triumphant first collection, remarkable for the poetic skill of the writer and the control and passion of his work.

Point Blank is a poetry vérité collection of observational poems, written in an immediate, cinematic style. Gary Duehr has an engaging, conversational tone that disguises the poetic craftsmanship of his work. He uses rhyme and half-rhyme with the rhythms of everyday speech to present vignettes of the lives around a detached observer. It creates a complex, nuanced portrait of modern life: think handheld Super 8 movies of apparently random incidents and lives, spliced together to create an intriguing revelation of how we live.

Gary Duehr has created a collection that is immensely enjoyable, clincially accurate, and hypnotically contemplative.

Let the Baby Sleep is a fearlessly exploratory collection of poems. The poet, Patrick T. Reardon, dissects the world of his childhood, his upbringing, his relationships with his parents and siblings, his maturation and growth, and the wrenching shock of his brother's suicide. With extraordinary skill and grace, he exposes the worlds—physical, mental, spiritual—that he inhabited and is forced still to inhabit, and asks us to confront them with him.

This is a rare collection. Reading these poems feels like a privilege that should be reserved for the poet and his family, but the warmth, generosity, humour, and love that permeates the whole is offered without reservation. The poems are, by turns, gentle, harrowing, contemplative, heartfelt, but always insistently demonstrative, insistently declarative. There is no turning away.

The Long and Short of It is a recto-verso book of poetry: the book is formatted to be read from either side. There are no page numbers in the book as the poet has structured the collection by the line length of the poems. From one side (the 'long' side), the poems are arranged from longest to shortest. On the other side, the poems are arranged from shortest to longest.

This is no mere curiosity of the typesetter's art, however. The poet has delivered an intriguing and revealing set of poems which take the reader from the immediate and striking short poems to the contemplative and complex longer poems. Or vice versa.

As the poet advises:

Please feel free to start from either side of the book.

As you read please adjust your perspective accordingly.

Artful Women is a collection of poems celebrating the achievements of women in Art. 

Helen Cerne casts an inquisitorial eye over the roles women have played (or to which they have been relegated) and presents a work that is simultaneously joyful, wonderous, admiring, outraged, angry, playful, and deeply personal. 

This is a remarkable collection of poems, and one which is certain to have you discovering new artists, re-examining the art you thought you knew, and possibly even insisting that a few old boys share their pedestals with the women who worked alongside them.

Speakeasy is the first collection of Perth poet, Ellie Cottrell. It is a sparkling work, presented in two parts: Conceal and Reveal.

'Conceal' groups poems of self-doubt, of longing, of regret. 'Reveal' answers those poems in a celebration of love, lust, and the joy of life shared and explored. Although these poems are engagingly joyful and immediately appealing, they repay careful reading and re-reading. This short collection announces a wonderfully skilled new poet.