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[RE]TURN | In From The Wilds with Kristen Lang

Name: [RE]TURN | In From The Wilds with Kristen Lang
Start: 2026-03-26T17:30:00+11:00
End: 2026-03-26T17:30:00+11:00
Location: Fullers Bookshop

About

“This is extraordinary work, pieces so rich in detail, experience, imagination and wisdom that one must read them slowly, aloud if possible, to savour and absorb each line and sentence. This is not theory, not preaching, not rancour, this is true love and knowledge of place. Lang takes her readers by the hand and, like a lover, introduces them gently to the mysteries of Earth.” David Brooks, winner of the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

What does the world we live in mean to us? More, when we bring it to mind, than just a platform for our daily living. Where we live is intricate, intimate, deep-time entangled and never, from the microbes of our guts to the minerals of the moon, only to do with humans. The poems of [re]turn are besotted not by the who but the inclusive where of what it is to be alive. Snout beetle, rain drop, these phone-cradling humans, the humpback whales, all of it, even AI, pours through these poems for the Earth we currently have. The world is not a stage. And perhaps, if we are lucky, there are ways to (re)turn to a being and becoming that is consciously, encompassingly, a part of it.

Kristen Lang lives in mountainous country in north-west Tasmania. In her writing, closeness and connection combine with a beyond-human view that celebrates ecological continuity. Kristen also works intensively as a volunteer wildlife surveyor, clocking up thousands of hours off-track to record the presences and behaviours of a diverse range of plants and animals. There are stones she knows intimately and many more yet to be understood. Together these lines of work – poetry and the gaining of an awareness of place – trace Kristen’s own understanding of what it is that matters, what waits for us if we listen, and what is in need of us doing just that.

Two of Kristen’s collections, SkinNotes and The Weight of Light, were published in 2017 by Walleah Press and Five Islands Press. Earth Dwellers was published in 2021 by Giramondo and was one of 20 books longlisted for the international Laurel Prize in that year. Earth Dwellers was also shortlisted for the Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry in 2022.

[RE]TURN picks up where Earth Dwellers left off and moves decisively forward. For the celebrated poet, Peter Boyle, it is “one of the finest new books I've read in a long time.”

From poet Michael Lavers: “This book’s great triumph is its vindication of a world already whole, an order that accounts as much for stars as star-nosed moles. And so saturated are Lang’s lines with wild places that they leave their traces on the reader. After handling these poems, I find their pollen on my fingertips. I brush their leaves out of my hair.”

From the much-loved poet Jane Williams: “Shimmering against the surface of exquisitely detailed imagery is the persuasive entreaty – beyond self-preservation or moral obligation – to care.”

Join Kristen at the Afterword Cafe.