This book is grounded deep in reality, as are the snake cultures and legends it draws from. Author Amanda Joy is a poet from the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Western Australia, origin of the Rainbow Serpent, the Great Spirit that represents the world's oldest religious tradition. According to Indigenous song-cycles, a snake literally created this country. These lines from the poem 'Your Ground' carry their wisdom lightly "snake says / be still / stand your ground / it the only protection we have.' This book quivers with snakes, consorting with birds and animals, in company with humans: "There's no animal alive / won't meet your eye." The author won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, created by Australian Book Review, in 2016. ***.This book is teaming with life, it's a celebration of families surrounded by animals, a book where ideas snake through the lines like arteries. Amanda Joy's variegated language explores rebellious ideas, delves into the underground but remains compassionate. This poet takes a hard look at the world now and yet comes up with a hugely optimistic book.--Robert Adamson (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]

This engrossing book explores the persistent allure of snakes, and traces the aesthetic, religious, and psychological impulses that have led artists thoughout the centuries to make these elusive creatures their subjects. An extraordinary array of illustrations reveals the many roles of the snake in art and history. 157 illustrations, 138 in color.

Communists Like Us is a simple love story, a little fiction told in a hundred poems, a hundred little places to live large, fragments of a story of love in a time of struggle. But then, when isn't it a time of struggle? And when is a story not about love? And when isn't love a fragmented but tender dialectic of the personal as political? This volume celebrates and explores the possibilities of political engagement in the midst of the very simple, the very human; an attempt at a confluence of dust and desire. (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]

Bringing together many of today's key scholars of verbal charming, these essays cover vernacular magical texts and practice from Malaysia to Madagascar, and from England to Estonia. As the most comprehensive collection of research on charms, charmers and charming available in the English language, it forms an essential reader on the topic.

A two-volume collection of folktales that were published in Papua New Guinea's Wantok newspaper. The two-volume collection presents the complete set of 1047 folktales that were originally published from 1972 through 1997 in Tok Pisin.