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Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist. Her poems and collections have received various nominations and awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, John Shaw Neilson award and the Tom Howard Poetry Prize. Short listings include the Anne Elder, Mary Gilmore, and Judith Wright Awards. She has read her work widely, including on Australian, Paris and New Zealand radio. It has also been the subject of ABC radio programs, Poetica and The Spirit of Things. Her collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Germany, Russia, New York and the UK. She was Asialink Writer in Residence, Malaysia, 2006. A selection of her poems, Among the Gone of It, was published in an English/Chinese edition by Flying Island Books in 2017. A song cycle composed by Andrew Aronowicz, based on her collection The Abbotsford Mysteries, premiered at The Abbotsford Convent Melbourne — now an arts precint — in 2019.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Among the Gone of It

帕特里夏•賽克斯：流逝 translators Xu Daozhi, Wu Xi 

Chris Song is a poet, translator and editor based in Hong Kong. He has published four collections of poetry and many volumes of poetry in translation. Song received an “Extraordinary Mention” at Italy’s UNESCO-recognized Nosside World Poetry Prize 2013. He won the Young Artist Award at the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards, presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. In 2019, he won the 5th Haizi Poetry Award. Song is now Executive Director of the Hong Kong International Poetry Nights, Editor-in-Chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and associate series editor of the Association of Stories in Macao. He also serves as an Arts Advisor to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Mirror Me

In National Library of Australia

Born in New York, he lived in many countries until Australia finally took him in. He was a Foreign Expert EFL teacher in China for many years. He now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, where he enjoys the blue skies, fresh air and the birds. There were some extreme sports once; now he plays (mostly) respectable chess and pool. A Moonbeam’s Metamorphosis/The Parachuting Man (with Nicholas Coleman) was published in 1979 by LEFTBANK PORTFOLIOS (Melbourne). He published two poetry collections in Shanghai: Snake Wine (2006) and Where Sound Goes When It’s Done (2010). A Chance of Seasons was published by Flying Island Books in 2017. 
More recently some of his poems have appeared in The Anthill, Oz Burp (Five) zine, Ariel Chart, The Blue Nib Magazine, Bluepepper, The Rye Whiskey Review, Pink Cover Zine, The Raw Art Review, OutlawPoetry, HUSK, the Sappho Lives! Anthology (2019, 2020), Taking Shape (Newcastle Poetry at the Pub Anthology, 2018, 2019, 2020), and the Messages From The Embers bushfire anthology (Black Quill Press, 2020). 
When he’s not writing, he likes taking photographs. He listens to the Grateful Dead. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

A Chance of Seasons

Kerri Shying is a poet of Chinese, Australian and Wiradjuri heritage who recently published sing out when you want me, a poetry collection that arose from receiving a Writing NSW Early Career Writer Grant in 2016. Membership & development officer Sherry Landow caught up with Kerri about the collection and other writing projects.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

Knitting Mangrove Roots

In National Library of Australia

Kerri Shying’s poetry taps into a very rich vein of experience. The work draws the reader in like an old friend, combining nourishing warmth with a subtle, snarky humour so precise, you can’t help laughing out loud. Knitting Mangrove Roots is Shying’s third book of poetry. The cover features a handmade “scarecrow” that is both homely and exotic, which is a good description of the poetry in this work. Though the book is the handsome pocket-size that Flying Island Books have become known for, Knitting Mangrove Roots is very much a full length collection. There are 86 poems in quite small text, each following the “elevensies” form that Shying invented and used to good effect in her book Elevensies, published in 2018 as part of Puncher and Wattman’s Slow Loris series. The form involves poems of eleven lines, with a jutting, italicised title in the middle separating the first and last parts. There is no punctuation, and everything is in lower case which gives the poems a soft quality that underlines Shying’s sharp vision. The unique structure of these poems presents a continuum from piece to piece as the title leans out towards the next poem. It almost feels as those these italicised titles form their own poem working simultaneously with the other pieces and sitting outside perimeter of the page. Each poem is short enough to read quickly and dense enough to savour through multiple re-readings.

sing out when you want me

“sing out when you need me is a powerful collection which reads easily but continues to reveal secrets and expand outward with each re-reading. The mostly short poems stay with you, becoming little charms against all of our inevitable deteriorations. It is all about “keeping going” which, in the face of pain, poverty, confinement, medical visits, the poking and prodding of life itself, becomes a heroic, transcendent act:”

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball Compulsive Reader June 2018

Gillian’s first poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001).

She has poems published in various anthologies including Poetry For The Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures (2021, Littoria Press), What we Carry: Poetry on Childbearing (2021, Recent Works Press), A Slow Combusting Hymn (ASM & Cerberus Press, 2014), and others. You can also find her work in various journals such as The Australian Poetry Collaboration (2019), Burrow (Old Water Rat Publishing, v1,2,3), and Live Encounters magazine: Special Australia-New Zealand edition (May 2021) and again in the Live Encounters Magazine 12^th Anniversary edition, Vol 2 (Dec 2021).

Gillian is involved in running various poetry events including Poetry At The Pub (Newcastle) and is the Co-Director and Poetry Curator of for the Indie Writers Festival ‘IF Maitland’.

Gillian spent her childhood exploring the waterfront of Lake Macquarie and has lived in Newcastle, Northern NSW, the UK and Ghana, after finishing studies at the University of Newcastle. She lives in East Maitland with her husband and their four children, where they run their successful coffee roasting business, River Roast.

Links: www.facebook.com/GillianSwainPoet

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

My skin its own sky

Gillian’s first poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001).