‘Publishing 100 books in 14 years is no small thing. To do it as a not-for-profit, local, community-run (or even one man run as Flying Islands has been for most of that that time) venture with some of the most exciting poets in Australia and around the world, in multi-lingual, sometimes coloured or pictoral, and always affordable formats while maintaining a not-for-profit, art-centric, collaborative focus is just phenomenal.
The names here read like a who’s who in the poetry zoo. These are names even non-poets know, alongside more emergent poets from Australia and overseas and even a few translations. I won’t give you a list of famous names or the many poets in this collection that I’m already a fan of but I’m certain you will find some names here that give you a little fangirl thrill. Just to take one example, following is a tiny couplet from Jill Jones’ “In All This Queer Apparel”)
Time is just a detour
Pleasure without the arms of guilt
This book represents most, if not all of the poets who have been published with the press over its long tenure and is a great way to immerse in the variety of styles across a spectrum of poets, old and young, performative and surreal, experimental, lyrical, classical, and translated. This is a book to enjoy slowly – maybe a poem a day. I’ve been waking with one poem before getting out of bed and I find it is a gorgeous way to begin the day with language, as a way to stimulate your own work or to simply engage yourself in this extraordinary community of parties -let’s call it COP100 – the more impactful COP: a cabal, a collective, a force for connection. The work in these pages forms its own conversation, linked, through serendipity – by the first letter of the work, so that the poems near one another form their own conversation.’
from Magdalena Ball’s launch of ‘100 poets’
