Newly published

A play in one act by poet and playwright, Jack Farrugia.

While racing to receive medical attention, two brothers, long disconnected by time and circumstance, confront a shared history and discover the reality of an unknown present.

Salt Flats in Heaven is an exploration of male tenderness and violence, anger and forgiveness. In this tense tragicomedy, Farrugia exposes the wrenching difficulties of two men striving to find and accomplish their purpose.

Corollary is a wildly ambitious collection of poems by young Nigerian poet, Anthony Ogbonnaya Chukwu. He retells the history of our cosmos and our species, translating the scientific knowledge of the physical into the personal and metaphysical language of poetry and religion.

Chukwu explores and celebrates the contradiction of our continuing primitiveness and our grandiose learning: "... we brought/the moon to our soles..."; the hubris of our ambitions and our ultimate fate: "How fascinating it will be that those who/were champions here... melted by the rays of the light"; the connection of our individuality with the enormousness of space: "When light was/created early/today,it did not find its way hard/in locating me".

Chukwu examines his world unflinchingly - "They burnt a young woman to a cinder/in Nigeria for allegedly crossing their red lines..." - but with enormous sympathy and quiet humour as his poems progress from the creation of our world to the appearance of our species. The final piece, a prose poem, uses the image of a fisherman lost in a storm to encapsulate our destiny. "This is how the

gathering is made to think about the present: the man, and what has happened".

In this thoughtful, confronting collection, Letizia faces life in the bleak, hard winters of the Northeastern United States, an environment which forces its people to acknowledge oblivion and to look for meaning in the experience. If meaning is often out of reach, the poet still looks to build, love, create, teach, learn and to record the effort, facing down oblivion "perhaps out of instinct, habit, conditioning, or simply because there is nothing else to do".

This collection is not a record of triumph, but a record of resilience and the of the moments when life lived in knowledge of oblivion still masters it, however briefly.

Not Missing a Single Thing is the story, the comprehensive story, of Ray and his journey from 'car crash' to triumph! Ray is a precocious ten year old boy who has had to endure numerous obstacles and difficulties, including the cruelties of bullies and the idiocy of an incompetent teacher. With the encouragement of one of his favourite teachers, he writes down his 'car crash' story as a means of getting the bad stuff out of his system.

Five years later, and a fifteen year old Ray is ready to continue his story. Armed with his trusted HB pencils he chronicles his adventures with unblinking honesty and zest. Will he find love, friendship, happiness, understanding, purpose? Is he capable of saving someone's life, and will he find out if magic really exists? Will he tell a story so resplendent that it can only be compared to a Rajasthani onion and potato curry?

Deeply personal and deeply political, the poems of Kyle-Sidell in A Material Rain are a record, analysis, and critique of current American society. His poetry describes the rage of the impotent, the impotence of the disengaged, and the numbing fog of cynical self-regard that blankets his country.

He spares no one - politicians, lobbyists, the wielders of interest, the indifferent - but always, his most unflinching, most searching examination is turned on himself. He is always looking for the glimmer of an answer, for something with which he can arm himself and those he cares for, to make sense, to give hope, to point the way.

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.

A coming of age story in a family where chaos is normal, the ludicrous is everyday, and the improbable is unexceptional. When you're growing up in such a turbulent environment, what could make it worse? Try adding lots of money, unequally shared!

It Grows on Trees is rollicking ride for Nelson and his astonishing collection of relatives and hangers-on that takes him across generations, several nations, affairs (both love and financial), and somehow or other… out the other side.

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.