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Melinda Smith is a poet, editor, teacher, arts advocate and event curator based in Canberra. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winner Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call. She frequently collaborates with artists in other disciplines including dancers, musicians and visual artists, and is also a former poetry editor of The Canberra Times. Her latest books are Goodbye, Cruel (Pitt Street Poetry, 2017) the chapbook Listen, bitch with artist Caren Florance (Recent Work Press, 2019) and Man-handled (Recent Work Press, 2020).

Links: melindasmithpoet.com and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Smith

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Perfectly Bruised

Perfectly Bruised is a bi-lingual selection of Melinda Smith’s work between 2001 and 2019, in English and Mandarin. Her poetry shifts between multiple voices, perspectives, and forms, by turns quirky, witty, tender and forceful. The judges of the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award described her as ‘a major new poet’ and her work as ‘full of unexpected and richly varied pleasures’, praising ‘its range of technique and tone’ and ‘its depth of ideas, imagery and emotion’. In this selection from her work the reader is often surprised, and sometimes disoriented – but never bored.

Translated by Karen Kun and Beibei Chen.

Jane Skelton is a Blue Mountains writer of poetry, short stories and novels. Chimera, her chapbook of prose and poetry was recently published by Rochford Press. Lives of the Dead and Other Stories was published in 2013 by Spineless Wonders, and her novella Flying Foxes was short-listed in the Carmel Bird Award and published as an eBook in 2015, also by Spineless Wonders.
Jane Skelton’s poetry and stories have also appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including in Overland, Island Magazine, Going Down Swinging, Hecate and the Margaret River Press collection. Earth Eaters, a novel, was a winner in the Varuna LitLink award in 2010, and extracts are included in Lives of the Dead.
Actors have given voice to her creative writing at Little Fictions events in Sydney, and in the 2018 Story-Fest.
Jane has a doctorate in Creative Arts and is a casual academic at Western Sydney University. She is a member of the LGBTIQA+ community.

Links: janeskelton.com.au

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

What the river told me

Where is home? Where is my place? Would I feel at home in the place of my ancestors, or is my place this invaded, colonised country, where I’ve mostly lived? In these poems, I journey to Scotland, to the moors of Northumberland, seeking a genetic thread. I think I’ve found my people, ‘but it was only the whiskey’. Home again, through rivers, the lake and the sea. The dry bush, Queensland, are washed in images of water. I dig at the roots of colonisation, the blackbirder William Boyd, who left his mark on a coast that I love, a wild, quiet place with a violent history. A centre, a heart-place is identified, only to be devastated by fire and flood, the onslaught of climate change. Virginia Shepherd’s illustrations, her strange primordial fish, are a pause, a counterpoint, a reflection on nature and transience.

Philip Salom is a contemporary Australian poet and novelist whose books have attracted widespread acclaim. He has published nineteen books – fourteen collections of poetry and five novels – notable for their originality and expansiveness and for surprising differences from title to title.

Philip Salom has won the Outstanding Achievement Award of the 4th Boao International Poetry Award, a major award for lifetime achievements in Poetry.

Philip Salom began publishing in 1980 and since then has written fourteen books of poetry and five novels. His book Sky Poems won the British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize in London for the overall Best Book of Poetry in the British Commonwealth and his first book The Silent Piano won the earlier Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Book. His collections are praised for their expansive imagination and language. He has received further acclaim through international reviews and from guest appearances in America, Canada, Britain, the Republics of Serbia and Macedonia, Italy, Singapore and New Zealand.

Of his five novels two have been shortlisted for Australia’s most prestigious fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Award (The Returns in 2020 and Waiting in 2016). The Returns was also shortlisted for the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award. Playback won the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Fiction. Salom’s novels have also been shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Prize, the ASL Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Prize. The Fifth Season was published in November (Transit Lounge, 2020).

Links: philipsalom.com

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Between Yes and No

Translation: Chris Song Zijiang and Iris Fan Xing

Between Yes and No is a selection of 17 poems, some short, some longer, over 38 pages. Each poem has an English version shown in parallel with a translation into Mandarin by one of the two translators, Chris Song Zijiang and Iris Fan Xing. The editor of this innovative series is Christopher (Kit) Kelen.

Beth Spencer is an award-winning author of poetry and fiction. Her work has frequently been broadcast on ABC-Radio National, and her books include How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House), The Party of Life (Flying Islands), Vagabondage (UWAP) and The Age of Fibs (ebook published by Spineless Wonders and winner of the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award). She lives and writes on Guringai & Darkinjung land on the NSW Central Coast; she has a website at www.bethspencer.com, and can be found on social media @bethspen

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

The Party of Life

trans Ruby Chen, Iris Fan Xing

I am delighted to be a part of the ASM/Flying Islands/Cerberus Pocket series of bilingual (English and Chinese) poetry books with this special collection of new and selected poems called The Party of Life.

These poems and prose poems were selected and translated into Mandarin by Ruby Chen, with additional translations by Iris Fan.

The Party of Life explores love, death, family, gender, sexuality, class and belonging. It is also about what is left unsaid — the gaps and juxtapositions — within and through which we create meaning and relationship.

I am a poet and visual artist who spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor. I think of my work as an intersection of chance with design — a collaboration with the media, painting with light while celebrating the way(s) pigment takes to surface, not showing or telling so much as opening a space for a play of possibility.

am interested in the way light breaks on edge, the way pigment takes to surface, the way words tumble out onto the page, the way the eye of the ear sees them.

I find common ground with John Cage when he says “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and (in the same piece, his “Lecture on Nothing”) when he says “Kansas is like nothing on earth.” Kansas, southeastern Colorado, the northeastern corner of New Mexico, the panhandle of Oklahoma, and (especially) the panhandle of Texas – that is where I grew up, and it shaped my eyes like nothing on earth.

I find common ground with Helen Frankenthaler when she embraces chance and lets paint flow on raw canvas to create forms that surprise and invite us to see worlds we would never have seen alone. This leads me to embrace lyric poetry as a form of abstraction (in the way that computer scientists use the term), a simplification (and an interface) that allows us to manipulate complexities below the surface without getting bogged down in them. And it leads me to agree with Georgia O’Keeffe when she says all painting is abstract.

I often find myself spending as much time on what is not there as on what is. This usually means focusing on a single image and letting the whole composition spring up around it — not a narrative but an all at once that evokes a here and now that is, here, now, neither. A likely story is likely to grow out of this when readers and viewers encounter it, but I hope my art always invites more than it contains.

Links: stevenschroeder.org

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

a water planet

Translations:

Song Zijiang 宋子江, Sou Vai Keng 蘇惠琼, Vai Si 維絲

The themes Schroeder takes up in a water planet are important ones—life in a Chinese city, the struggle to find meaning, our ability to take responsibility for history—and occasionally, the poems provide a sharp insight or turn of phrase. Still, many of the themes are handled in a way that seems superficial, and the reader is left feeling that these poems could have been pushed further into something more fresh.