ICOE Press
Our Books
A Material Rain
Jonas Kyle-Sidell
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.


Read an extract...
Living Fossils are the Happiest Kind
Howard V. Hendrix
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.


Read an extract...
Two Tongue World
Maria Koukouvas
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. Koukouvas 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.


Read an extract...
Red Rite Hand
Adrian Harte
Adrian Harte's poetry collection is a startling and intense exploration of the poet in his world, with poems of humour, love, and 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.


Read an extract...
Point Blank
Gary Duehr
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
Patrick T. Reardon
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.


Read an extract...
The Long and Short of It
H.T. Grossen
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.


Read an extract...
Artful Women
Helen Cerne
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.


Like Scavenger Birds
Martha Landman
Martha Landman is a poet who writes on Kaurna land in Adelaide, South Australia. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Australia, the UK, US, and South Africa.

In her new collection, ‘Like Scavenger Birds’, she explores themes of identity, belonging, love, loss, ageing, and resilience, drawing on and finding resounding echoes in the richness and variety of life in Australia and Africa.

This is a generous and thoughtful collection by a new star of Australian poetry. With vivid imagery and lyrical language, she invites her readers on a journey of discovery and reflection as she scavenges for meaning and beauty in the physical landscape and in the complexities of human relationships.

Speakeasy
Ellie Cottrell
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.

Add this new chapbook to your collection of brilliant new Australian poetry!

DUSK
Richard Mullen
DUSK is a sequence of 81 poems all written in the same format: five long lines to each poem.

It is a quixotic collection that crackles with shifts of imagery and language as rapid as thoughts flashing in and out of mind, triggered by odd associations and creating new associations and paths.

At once erudite and homely, formal and unstructured, puzzling and humorous, Richard Mullen has created an intriguing and vibrant work.

The Amnesia of Tulips
Joel Schueler
Joel Schueler is a singer-songwriter, novelist, and poet.

The Amnesia of Tulips is a richly varied collection of poems, presented in three parts. It shifts between poetic styles and forms, exploring experience and insight and constructing an unrestricted language of thought.

The book presents fifteen poems in 'The Collection Proper' which it follows with a generous 'Encore' of four poems. It closes with a musician's nod to his influences and favourites with another four poems in 'Tribute Corner'.

All's Well That Inks Well
Richard Dove
In a sparkling collection of epigrammatic poems, Richard Dove, entertains, puzzles, confronts, and educates his readers. These poems are collected from the notebooks that Richard keeps with him at all times and although they shine with the immediacy of sudden thought and inspiration, they are also carefully polished and closely worked.

As the poet writes in a preface:
An eclectic selection
of thoughts, reflections, memories
and rhythmical musings,
captured in little Japanese notebooks
as small poems,
All’s Well that Inks Well will take you
on a journey
into this writer’s mind...


Enjoy the journey!


The Tercets
Jack Farrugia
The Tercets is a remarkable poem, remarkable for its length, audacity, and for the lush, deft skill of its author, Jack Farrugia. Although it is a narrative poem telling of the aching longing of lost love, cast as a pilgrimage through the landscapes of the Levant, it is perhaps more accurately described as a descriptive poem, a landscape at once external and interior. It does not rely on incident to tell its story, but conjures a narrative of a stream of images, of the experience of the senses, of the hallucinatory imagination of the pilgrim. We travel with the pilgrim through his unending, footsore journey, through his remembered past, and through his questioning of his life and pilgrimage and its ultimate goal.

Told in spare, three line stanzas which give the poem its title, Jack Farrugia has created a masterwork: a poem of breathtaking depth and range and beauty.

It is an extraordinary achievement.
.
Like a Small City
Carla de Goede
Carla de Goede's poems are poems of the celebration of survival. And they are a celebration, even the harrowing, the startling, the shocking poems. They celebrate the survival of the poet and the survival of her attempts to understand her world and to communicate her understanding to us.

Although most of her poems seem centred in an urban world, they are infused with an arcadian magic. Buildings, seen from a train, are 'running like concrete emus'. Pedestrians walk past 'like speeding skinks'. An abandoned house is 'all dark windows / and skulking cats'. A white-coated scientist is 'like a kite stuck in a tree'. The natural world is everywhere in her poems and refuses to be excluded.

De Goede's poems are intriguing, unsettling, hopeful, and joyful. She writes of 'scraping ink together / like I know what I'm doing'.

She knows what she's doing.
.
A Library of Things
Mark Fleckenstein
Mark Fleckenstein is a poet of moments: moments caught and transcribed and wondered at and presented for wonder. His poetry creates the cerebral equivalent of retinal persistence: the images and phrases of his poems echo past the turn of the page and fire an impulse to re-read and reconsider and reconnect. This is an important collection from an accomplished and ambitious poet.

Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Mark Fleckenstein has published four books of poetry: Making Up the World, God Box, A Name for Everything, and Lowercase God. He has also published several chapbooks.

A Library of Things is his first collection published by in case of emergency press.
.
Toward the Real
Angelo J. Letizia
Angelo Letizia has crafted a wonderful collection of poems which examine impossibly large questions - What is truth? What is real? How can we know? - and looks for answers in a quizzical examination of the everyday.

The poetic voice exploring these cosmic questions of the domestic is by turns baffled, amused, outraged, resigned, hopeful, grateful. Faced with the impossibility of finding definitive answers, Letizia offers the poems themselves and posits "now we need poetry to find truth". No argument from us!

Toward the Real is a wonderfully complex collection that is engaging, immediate, and rewarding..
.
Tuesday's Child Is Full
PS Cottier
Since 2009, PS Cottier has been committed to posting a new poem each week on her blog, pscottier.com, usually on a Tuesday. That discipline has not only given her a collection of thirteen years of writing from which to choose the rich selection for this book, but also the playful title of the collection!

Tuesday's Child is Full is a diverse, sprawling, wildly entertaining collection of poems from a poet at the very top of her game. She writes with a fearless accuracy and a sympathetic wit. Her poems are calm and profound and effortlessly display the universal in the domestic. She is a modern pastoral poet, not only celebrating the wild and untamed, but placing our experience of an urban everyday in a natural setting, whether that is the death of that most unheroic of pets, a guinea pig, or the act of contemplating a mango. Her poems have the power to awaken an appreciation of the eternal and beautiful all around us.
Batmanticism
Chad Parmenter
Chad Parmenter's Batmanticism is an extraordinary collection of poems which explores classic poetic themes and forms while dressed in a cosplay mask, cape, and bat boots.

Do not be deceived.

These poems are masterful examples of poetic craftsmanship. Popular culture, or, rather, the way the author manipulates our imaginative response to figures of popular culture, is used with surgical precision and delivers a collection which is moving, profound, humorous, and intriguing.
Finishing Stroke
Peter Murphy
We are proud to announce the publication of Peter Murphy's latest collection of poems.

This is a collection of some of the finest pieces of one of Australia’s most important and respected poets. It is a generous and ambitious project; reflective and joyful in equal measure, profound and playful, Finishing Stroke is rare in offering a deceptively joyful immediacy which reveals more and more of its intellectual antecedents on reflection and re-reading.

Peter Murphy's work is always a linguistic and visual joy and the poems in Finishing Stroke are no exception. His regular readers will appreciate his continuing exploration of the ordinary to expose the extraordinary; new readers will delight in the discovery of a poet of rare irreverence and wit.
Convictions of the Heart
John L. Holgerson
Convictions of the Heart is a new collection from US poet, John L. Holgerson. The collection is divided in two parts. The first part, Hydra, is Holgerson’s delicate paean to an island he fell in love with when he first visited in 1970 and to which he still returns. The second part, Other Places, Other People, moves the setting from the Aegean Sea to explore the loves and lives of the poet’s experience away from Hydra. What unifies the whole collection is Holgerson’s masterful exploration of a fascination with memory, time, and experience and the shifting perspective that comes with arrival, leaving, recalling, returning.

This is an important collection from a masterful poet, at once challenging and reassuring, insightful and comforting.
A Tea with Shostakovich
Fulvio Tramontano
"A Tea with Shostakovich is a dream with that 'special chaos' of a dream, which, for William Burroughs, was the hidden secret of Mexico. A 'special chaos', because everything—sometimes weirdly, sometimes eerily—is ever fluid in a dream, and, whatever happens, nobody blinks an eye during it, never. It is absolutely normal to start your day on a bridge in Prague and few minutes later—or few centuries later, because Time does not exist in dreams—being Along the soft banks/of murky Mekong, watching a beautiful and cruel harlot. Why is everything so normal and so logical and why are you completely comfortable with it? Shakespeare, as ever, has the answer: 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep'. " - Fulvio Tramontano
Decorating Pain
Rosie Bogumil
Decorating Pain is a confronting collection by Rosie Bogumil, a five time winner of the prestigious Randolph Stowe Award, who is perhaps better known to spoken word fans as Rosie Bee.

In these searing poems, Rosie captures the raw reality of a life lived alongside depression, anxiety, eating disorders and PTSD, but she also records an uplifting account of the triumph of self-acceptance.

This first collection heralds a rich and skilful new poetic voice.
Unearthly Pleasures
Steve Evans
Steve Evans was raised in country towns in South Australia. He was previously the Head of English and Creative Writing at Flinders University, and now edits and teaches for community groups and individuals.

"Putting Unearthly Pleasures together reminded me that a collection of poems is like a village. Its residents might share a neighbourhood but each poem is its own creature on its own personal stage. Their character differs. There’s bickering and harmony, contradictions and confluence, raised voices and sometimes disturbing though quiet ones. There are heroes and villains, and some wearing masks, perhaps seeming light-hearted but making a serious point."
Jeremiad Johnson
Tim Hawkins
Tim Hawkins’ Jeremiad Johnson balances on the razor wire between natural beauty and disgust with the world as it has devolved to us. ...what Hawkins reveals in his poems is a fortifying or merciless vision. Sometimes both.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske

In Jeremiad Johnson, Hawkins takes on the poetic voice of a common man surviving somehow in this world we all share together. This is deft observational poetry that escorts readers into the familiar and recognizable scenes that Hawkins paints for us with vivid imagery, touches of irony and subtle humility.
Barry Harris
Palmistry
Christopher Ringrose
Christopher Ringrose's elegant and sophisticated verse explores mysteries, joys, experiences as they unfurl over decades. These are gentle, explorative, contemplative, but always surprising poems which repay reading and re-reading. Palmistry is the record of life which no one ever predicts.
The eye as it inhales onions
Lika Posamari
Presenting these intensely personal but always outward-looking poems, Lika Posamari explores the pain, strength, and wisdom that women draw from the complexity of their relationships across generations. These poems invite the reader to share Lika's startling, uncompromising, but ultimately triumphant conclusions.
The Geometry of a Thought
Gavin Mndawe
The poems in this collection are playful, energetic, and electrically intellectual. Influenced by the rhythms of rap and its inventive exploration and stretching of language to uncover new and unexpected connections, Gavin presents a collection which is simultaneously joyful and provocative.
Lightly, on the skin
Em König
Em König has assembled a collection which experiments with forms and structures to present his ideas in poems which display themselves like carefully constructed scenes of a single work of theatre. His poetry is unmistakably personal, but never solemn, never self-important or self-obsessed. He shows how the most important touches may only initially touch us lightly, on the skin, but which may reverberate forever.
real and unreal
Stephen House
Stephen House's poetry is startling, direct, and fiercely honest. His poems hold your gaze while challenging you to look away. Stephen's poems are a masterful assertion of the existence and persistence of beauty, uncompromised, unblemished, unconquered. Stephen won the 2018 Goolwa Poetry Cup with a performance of two of the poems included in this collection.
The Sonnets
Howard Firkin
The sonnets of Howard Firkin, collected in one edition for the first time.
The Ajoona Guesthouse
Stephen House
"Remarkable, original and deeply evocative writing"
THEATRE TRAVELS
"A rich potency and deep poetic magnitude"
RADIO ADELAIDE
Following its successful premiere, we are proud to publish a chapbook edition of the script of Stephen House's brilliant one man play, 'The Ajoona Guesthouse'.

Stephen House is a masterful story teller and The Ajoona Guesthouse is a fast paced celebration of the lives of a wonderfully varied selection of humanity, living on their wits and charm, exploiting and exhibiting unending generosity, caring and careless, fragile and astonishingly strong. Based on the author's lived experience in urban and rural India, The Ajoona Guesthouse is rivetting: entertaining and deeply profound.

Stephen House's first collection of poetry,
real and unreal, is also published by in case of emergency press.
Love Bird
Georgie Harriss
It’s Franny’s eighth birthday and she’s getting her first pet – a cockatiel called Prince Ping Pong.

She’s always wanted someone to love, and more importantly, someone to love her back. But when Prince Ping Pong starts loving their daughter the
wrong way, Joan and Richard are thrown into an absurdist parenting nightmare. They must try to remove the deviant bird while conserving what’s left of Franny’s innocence.

After all, these are her formative years.

Love Bird is a powerful, funny, beautifully crafted play which explores the natural process of childhood sexual development and how it is controlled, twisted and warped - often by those who mean to protect it.
Granny Beggard's Chair
Howard Firkin
Howard Firkin's withering look at life in Mullock, a small Australian town with big plans and bigger characters.

What happens when one of the town's least respected inhabitants becomes one of its most important? Will Granny Beggard's eccentric scheme to avoid another drink driving charge derail Mullock's glorious future?

Sad, funny, wholly unlikely, and wholly predictable, the end of Granny Beggard's dreams are the start of a brand new Mullock.
Todd in Venice
Sofia Chapman
Todd in Venice is a sparklingly playful script, full of linguistic acrobatics and sexual intrigue, where gender is as fluid as the reality of the city in which it is set. Inspired by Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), Sofia Chapman takes her readers on a guided tour of Venice and humanity, by turns poignant, funny, provocative, and joyful.

Todd in Venice premiered in a shortened form at Gasworks Arts Park ‘Playtime’ development program on St Agnes’ night, Midsumma Festival 2016. It opened in its full version in February 2017 for the Midsumma Festival of that year.

Warmly received by audiences at its opening, Todd in Venice is a richly rewarding play to read, allowing a full appreciation of the skilful layering of meaning and language. Truly a delight!
Fit for Nothing
Howard Firkin
Howard Firkin's eclectic play which features appearances by Martin Heidegger, Anne Hathaway (both of them), and Pish, the spirit of our age.
A story of love triumphant, even as it fails...
One Surviving Story
The question was simple: if you knew only one of your stories would survive you, which would you choose?

Twenty-eight writers select their best-loved stories for this remarkable anthology.
One Surviving Poem
The question was simple: if you knew only one of your poems would survive you, which would you choose?

The forty-two poets selected for this anthology responded with some surprising choices.
Footprints in the Hills
Mudgee Valley Writers
A collection of the life stories of some of Mudgee’s most prominent residents, edited by Jill Baggett and Pamela Meredith, this anthology presents the life stories of a fascinating and enterprising group of individuals.
"Such stories, such variety in the histories of these
people now collected and held for coming generations
to read and wonder. Lives so different from today..."
in case of emergency press ● for writers who are sick of emerging and are ready for the full emergency