‘Above all, poetry – for both its readers and its writers – is a form that demands attentiveness and active intelligence. It treats language as a volatile and charged commodity, and one whose subtleties and nuances are worth puzzling over.’ —Sarah Holland-Batt Award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic Sarah Holland-Batt takes the helm as editor of this year’s Best Australian Poems. Demonstrating the diversity, inventive brilliance and dynamism of our country’s finest poets, this collection features work from both rising stars and well-known figures, and presents a dazzling array of themes and styles. Whether addressing biotechnology or domestic violence, migrant experience or the natural world, the poems in this anthology are sure to inspire, provoke and move. Poets include Martin Harrison, Judith Beveridge, Clive James, Keven Brophy, Joanne Burns, Les Murray, Pam Brown, Eileen Chong, Luke Davies, Laurie Duggan, Geoff Page, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Toby Fitch, Robert Gray, Lisa Gorton, Natalie Harkin, John Kinsella, Felicity Plunkett, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Billy Marshall Stoneking, Cate Kennedy, David Malouf, Julie Chevalier, Lionel G. Fogarty and many more…

Award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic Sarah Holland-Batt takes the helm again as editor of this year’s Best Australian Poems. Previous contributors include Judith Beveridge, Stephen Edgar, Fiona Wright, Clive James, Lisa Gorton, Robert Adamson, Dorothy Porter, John Kinsella, David Malouf, Cate Kennedy and Les Murray. Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of The Hazards (UQP, 2015), which won the poetry prize at the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, and Aria (UQP, 2008), which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Award, and the FAW Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards. She is presently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology and the poetry editor of Island.

'The essay creates a place for slow thought on hectic subjects, and that is what the best of this year's crop manage to do.' GEORDIE WILLIAMSON In The Best Australian Essays 2016, Geordie Williamson curates the year's best non-fiction writing from Australia's finest writers. The result is a collection that reads as a wake-up call- from Jo Chandler on the devastating bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and Richard Flanagan on the Syrian exodus to Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani's inside account of life on Manus Island. There is also space for Bowie, TV box-sets and Aussie rules. Spanning politics, music, literature, art, ecology, linguistics and more, this anthology showcases the nation's most eloquent and insightful writing. Maggie Mackellar In Sympathy- A Fugue * Ashley Hay The Bus Stop * Rebecca Giggs Whale Fall * Anwen Crawford The Noise Made By People * Melinda Harvey She Thinks She Is The Boss * Mireille Juchau The Most Holy Object in the House * Fiona Wright A World of Bald White Days * Vicki Hastrich Things Seen * Helen Garner This Old Self * Tegan Bennett Daylight Vagina * Jennifer Mills Detroit, I Do Mind * Fiona McGregor The Experience Machine * Michelle de Kretser Like a Thief in the Night * Jo Chandler Grave Barrier Reef * Anna Spargo-Ryan How to Love Football * Peter Goldsworthy Review of Chorale at the Crossing by Peter Porter * Gregory Day Review of John Kinsella's 'Drowning in Wheat' * J.M. Coetzee Introduction to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier * James Bradley David Bowie- Loving the Alien * Galarrwuy Yunupingu Rom Watangu * Richard Flanagan Notes on the Syrian Exodus * Adam Rivett 35,000 Pieces of Converted Culture * Michael Winkler The Great Red Whale * Behrouz Boochani Life on Manus- The Island of the Damned * Martin McKenzie-Murray On Mass Shootings * Guy Rundle On Modern Terrorism * Clive James Play All * Julian Burnside What Sort of Country Are We? * Kim Scott Both Hands Full

This is the first of a new series, offering a poetic snapshot of the year that was, 1 July 2020-30 June 2021--featuring 100 poets and 100 poems across an astonishing range of poetic voice, approaches and themes.

This anthology brings together Australia's most striking literary talents and provides a platform for those unpublished gems. This year Stella Prize-winning author Charlotte Wood takes the helm, putting together yet another enchanting collection.

The third poetry collection by Lisa Gorton, one of a small number of Australian writers who have won major literary awards for both poetry and fiction. Lisa Gorton began writing Empirical when the Victorian Government of the time threatened to cut an eight-lane motorway through the heart of Royal Park in Melbourne. She walked repeatedly in the park, seeking to understand how the feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and out of each other. The poems exploring this feeling for place are followed by a sequence which recreates the colonial history of Royal Park through the gathering of fragments from newspapers, maps and pictures, a different way of asserting its value, by demonstrating how a landscape can conceal the history of country beneath its layers of time. From this close-up study, in its second part the collection opens out into poems which meditate on ancient statues, Rimbaud’s imperial panoramas, the making of Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’, the exhibition galleries of Crystal Palace — tracking, through chains of influence, and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire, commodities and dreams of elsewhere. Empirical follows a deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted in the contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned. Praise for Gorton's second poetry collection Hotel Hyperion: 'A sustained and complex exploration of how outer and inner worlds connect, of how to approach and address what we see, of the shapes and disfigurements of memory, of the links between dream, hallucination, reality and being. [It is] replete with persistent, transformative crystallisations.' — Sydney Review of Books 'In her poems, we see ­– briefly, behind us – cities; but her focus is on the human sphere; and, within its circle, the mind; and within that, art.' — Mascara Literary Review

In the age of social media, life writing is ubiquitous. But if life writing is now almost universal—engaged with on our phones; reported in our news; the generator of capital, no less—then what are the limits of life writing? Where does it begin and end? Do we live in a culture of life writing that has no limits? Life writing—as both a practice and a scholarly discipline—is itself markedly concerned with limits: the limits of literature, of genres, of history, of social protocols, of personal experience and forms of identity, and of memory. By attending to limits, border cases, hybridity, generic complexities, formal ambiguities, and extra-literary expressions of life writing, The Limits of Life Writing offers new insights into the nature of auto/biographical writing in contemporary culture. The contributions to this book deal with subjects and forms of life writing that test the limits of identity and the tradition of life writing. The liminal case studies explored include magical-realist fiction, graphic memoir, confessional poetry, and personal blogs. They also explore the ethical limits of representation found in Holocaust life writing, the importance of ficto-critical memoir as a form of resistance for trans writers, and the use of ‘postmemoir’ to navigate the traumas of diasporic experience. In addition, The Limits of Life Writing goes beyond the conventional limits of life writing scholarship to consider how writers themselves experience limits in the creation of life writing, offering a work of life writing that is itself concerned with charting the limits of auto/biographical expression. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.