Vagabond Press - Six New Poetry Collections
About
Hosted by Luke Fischer, with readings by Rhea Cai, Bronte Heron, Ella Skilbeck-Porter, Laurie Duggan, Kate Lilley, and Peter Boyle, join us as we celebrate the release of six new collections from some of Australia’s most distinctive, innovative and original poets.
Rhea Cai, Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties
Bringing forward a luminous, intimate exploration of the Chinese Australian experience, Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties navigates questions of femininity, desire, love, filial piety, and cultural identity. The collection draws from the traditional Chinese concept of mian zi, or ‘saving face’, and is steeped in the pain of inherited silences, self-censorship and cultural anxieties around womanhood. Hybrid in form and experimental in content, the collection asks the reader to contemplate the limitations of the English language on colonised land. Rhea Cai is a poet and writer based in Sydney. Her work has appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review and The Australian Poetry Journal. Questions I’m Scared to Ask at Parties is her first poetry collection.
Bronte Heron, Nighttime Gardener
Situated within queer ecopoetics, Nighttime Gardener explores how care, attention, and relation operate within damaged and interdependent environments. Rather than offering pastoral idealisation or environmental consolation, the collection dwells with uncertainty, responsibility, and the labour of staying with what is compromised. By focusing on small, ongoing acts of care, Nighttime Gardener articulates ways of living and writing within entangled, damaged worlds. Bronte Heron is a poet and writer from Aotearoa living on Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung Country in Gariwerd, Australia. Nighttime Gardener is their first book.
Ella Skilbeck-Porter, Crescentcrescent
Ella Skilbeck-Porter’s second collection Crescentcrescent moves and shifts forms, revolving around the space of the house and neighbouring streets, circling and orbiting interiority. There are moments of transformation, of shifting states, exemplified through the rotations between the sections and sequences: generative leaps that allow for formal play and continuation. Ella Skilbeck-Porter is a poet and visual poet living on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne. Her debut collection of poetry These are Different Waters (2023) was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award and the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest and was highly commended in the Anne Elder Award.
Laurie Duggan, The New Weather
The New Weather is a journal written over the last few years, following whatever those seasons have become, taking time out here and there to look at art, read other poets and listen to music. These innocent activities take place in a world where climate and the body (or bodies) politic have become forces impossible to anticipate, in which any notion of the ‘normal’ has been left well behind. Laurie Duggan has published some twenty books of poems together with Ghost Nation, a work about imagined space. His most recent books are Homer Street (2020), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award, and Selected Poems 1971-2017 (2018), which received a special commendation in the UK Poetry Book Society Awards that same year.
Kate Lilley, Throes
Kate Lilley’s fourth full-length collection, Throes, revels in the poetic possibilities of verbal and visual shapes and patterns to explore the vicissitudes of form, relation, embodiment and alteration, for good and ill. The poems play with constraint, repetition, addition, subtraction and citation, using a baroque mix of concretes, images and traditional lyric set forms (sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, cinqain) as supercharged structural and design elements. Kate Lilley is a queer poet-scholar. Her first book, Versary (2002) won the Grace Leven Prize and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Prize. Her second, Ladylike (2012), was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Award. Her third, Tilt (2018), won the Victorian Premier's Prize.
Peter Boyle, The Wide Starless Silence
Building on his previous award-winning collections, such as Enfolded in the Wings of Darkness and Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions, The Wide Starless Silence offers a sustained dialogue with the cosmos’ apparent silence and makes explicit a spirituality that has evolved through the consolations and insights of a lifetime devoted to art, philosophy and creativity. Peter Boyle is a poet and translator of poetry living and working on Dharug land. He has ten books of poetry published and eight books as a translator of poetry from Spanish and French. In 2020 his book Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness won the New South Wales Premier's Award for Poetry. His book Ghostspeaking also received the New South Wales Premier's Award in 2017. Other prize-winning books include Apocrypha (2009), The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997) and Coming Home from the World (1993).
Luke Fischer is a poet, philosopher and writer. He is the author of the poetry collections A Gamble for my Daughter (2022), A Personal History of Vision (2017) and Paths of Flight (2013), the monographs Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking: Romanticism and the Living Present (2024) and The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the 'New Poems' (2015), and the children's books Journey to the Crystal Mountain: And Other Adventures of Petra and Tim (2026) and The Blue Forest (2015).
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
