Of course not all great art has its genesis in pain, and not all pain-not even a fraction-leads to the partial consolations of art. But if lancing an abscess is the surest way to healing, can poetry offer that same cleansing of emotional wounds? Shaping the Fractured Self showcases twenty-eight of Australia's finest poets who happen to live with chronic illness and pain. The autobiographical short essays, in conjunction with the three poems from each of the poets, capture the body in trauma in its many and varied moods. Because those who live with chronic illness and pain experience shifts in their relationship to it on a yearly, monthly, or daily basis, so do the words they use to describe it. This book gives voice to sufferers, carers, medical practitioners, and researchers, building understanding in a community of caring. [Subject: Chronic Illness, Poetry, Health Studies]

In The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self, Susan Harrow explores the fascinating interrelation of subjectivity, materiality, and representation in the poetry and related texts of four modern French writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, and Jacques Réda. She demonstrates the richness and the relevance of modern French poetry for today's readers, putting contemporary thought to work on the fractured self emerging in the post-Baudelairian lyric. Harrow addresses the widely perceived marginalization of poetry in the writing/theory debate, demonstrating that the emergence of a self at once shaped by and straining against material, historical, subjective, and cultural impediments reveals fertile relations between theory and poetry. Where purer forms of postmodernist thinking have stressed the dissolution and dispersal of the human subject, new approaches informed by cultural studies, autobiography theory, and gender studies work to recover fictions of experience and retrieve submerged narratives of the self. Probing the activity of textual self-recovery among the debris of history and fantasy, visuality and desire, and culture and corporeality, The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self imparts something of the startling beauty and the raw urgency of poetry writing across the broad modern period.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability brings together some of the most influential and important contemporary perspectives in this growing field. The book traces the history of the field and locates literary disability studies in the wider context of activism and theory. It introduces debates about definitions of disability and explores intersectional approaches in which disability is understood in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality and ethnicity. Divided broadly into sections according to literary genre, this is an important resource for those interested in exploring and deepening their knowledge of the field of literature and disability studies.

With warmth and compassion, Sandra Ingerman describes the dramatic results of combining soul retrieval with contemporary psychological concepts in this visionary work that revives the ancient shamanic tradition of soul retrieval for healing emotional and physical illness. This revised and updated edition includes a new afterword by the author.

"Heather Taylor Johnson has a poet's understanding of the world: her exploration of the way in which our lives intertwine – for better or for worse – is nuanced and poignant." Hannah Kent, bestselling author of Burial Rights and The Good People Jean Harley – wife, mother, lover, dancer – is a shining light in the lives of those who know and love her. But when tragedy strikes, what becomes of the people she leaves behind? Her devoted husband, Stan, is now a single father to their young son, Orion. Her best friends, Neddy and Viv, find their relationship unravelling at the seams. And Charley, the ex-con who caused it all, struggles to reconcile his past crimes with his present mistakes. Life without Jean will take some getting used to, yet her indelible imprint remains. Jean Harley Was Here is a touching and original exploration of love, relationships, and the ways in which we need each other.

Highly Commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript**** "This is an alive, refreshing and, quite literally, elemental book of water and skin, muscle and fire. Rachael Mead's poems are immediate and grounded whilst entwined with fragility and struggle. They don't shy from the difficulties and sadness as well as joy in human kinship. Along the way Mead offers us a clear-eyed self-consciousness of the human within the larger places of the earth, in this case places such as Antarctica, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, Ikara-Flinders Ranges. The book offers us an embodied sense of secular ritual in its attentiveness and its use of form-lists, lyric iterations, admonitions-as the poet both argues and confides with herself and us, about the wild pleasures of earth's physical and emotional topographies, and of our responsibilities within all this. A powerful and invigorating book of journeys well worth taking."--Jill Jones (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]

Unearthly Pleasures is a sparkling collection of poetry from a mature poet at the top of his game. The poems radiate the generous warmth of an acute observer of humanity who manages to maintain his affection and understanding for the people and situations which populate his world. Steve Evans has the remarkable ability to observe and maintain an objective distance while still engaging directly and passionately with his subjects.