To love in a language prised from my wishbone. To sing a landscape where village girls burst the moon with giggles. To dance through the fattest eye of a rice-grain -- to do all these in peace and war is the wish embodied in Merlinda Bobis' poetry. From her epic poem 'Cantala of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon' to lyric reflections on longing, and finally to an erotic poetry-dance-drama, Bobis traces the cartography of desire and its intimacy with death.

In her lush, luminous debut novel, Merlinda Bobis creates a dazzling feast for all the senses. Richly imagined, gloriously written, Banana Heart Summer is an incandescent tale of food, family, and longing—at once a love letter to mothers and daughters and a lively celebration of friendship and community. Twelve-year-old Nenita is hungry for everything: food, love, life. Growing up with five sisters and brothers, she searches for happiness in the magical smell of the deep-frying bananas of Nana Dora, who first tells Nenita the myth of the banana heart; in the tantalizing scent of Manolito, the heartthrob of Nenita and her friends; in the pungent aromas of the dishes she prepares for the most beautiful woman on Remedios Street. To Nenita, food is synonymous with love—the love she yearns to receive from her disappointed mother. But in this summer of broken hearts, new friendships, secrets, and discoveries, change will be as sudden and explosive as the monsoon that marks the end of the sweltering heat—and transforms Nenita’s young life in ways she could never imagine.

Alternately mythic, wistful, and quirky, this short story anthology resonates with an original and confident storytelling voice. An anomalous kiss, a white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead, a working siesta in a five-star hotel, a woman’s 12-meter hair trawling corpses from a river, and a queue of longings in Sydney: these are some of the subjects of the 23 enigmatic tales brimming with chance and hope.

The myth of the banana heart inspires 12-year-old Nenita, growing up in a small, impoverished Filippino town. She will appease her family's hunger and win her violent mother’s affection. Touching, funny, elegaic, this is a truly original book that will remain in your mind, and in your senses, long after you read it.

Entries profile women writers of poetry, fiction, prose, and drama, including Sylvia Plath, Fleur Adcock, and Toni Morrison.

The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. after four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But between, the port hopes: 'there could be accidents of kindness here.' In her latest collection of poetry, award-winning author Merlina Bobis traces the accidents of art and life. Drawing on the journal of Pigafetta whose writings have become an accident of history, Merlinda Bobis composes with an attuned ear and her poems are rich with imagery; with breath and heart.

This volume investigates Australian poetry's centrality to debates around colonialism, nationalism, diversity, embodiment, local-global relations, and the environment.