The Art Box Series
Quality reprint classics from Picaro Press
Good poetry just doesn't stay in print as long as it should. Many of the most influential, interesting and relevant volumes from out best poets are no longer available. Picaro Press is working to change that.
Our Art Box Series aims to provide low-cost access to significant Australian poetry from the 1980s and earlier which, for whatever reason, is no longer generally available to the public. Each volume just costs $15, domestic postage included. Titles in the series to date include:
Judith Beveridge, The Domesticity of Giraffes
Tom Shapcott, Shabbytown Calender
Jan Owen, Blackberry Season
Evan Jones, Understandings
Roger MacDonald, Airship
David Campbell, The Man in the Honeysuckle
Jean Kent, Verandahs
Andrew Lansdown, Waking & Always
Judith Rodriguez, Mudcrab at Gambaro’s
Geoff Page, Smalltown Memorials
Rhyll McMaster, Washing the Money
Ken Taylor, At Valentines
Roland Robinson, The Hooded Lamp
Gary Catalano, Fresh Linen
More titles coming soon. Order yours today!
The Aegis Series
Keeping the best poetry working ...
Short print runs, slow sales, and booksellers' aversion to committing precious shelf space mitigate against even the most popular poetry titles. Good poetry which sells well doesn't always get the exposure it deserves, and it tends to disappear far too soon. Stephen Edgar's much-praised Lost in the Foreground is a good example: first published in 2003, it was out of print within three years. Demand was still strong — just not strong enough to convince Duffy & Snellgrove that the expense of a second print run was worth the risk. This is where print-on-demand comes into its own. Picaro Press can keep these titles in circulation indefinitely, without investing thousands of dollars in stock which might not sell through for years. To date, the following titles are available — and we're always interested in more. Contact us for details.
Stephen Edgar , Lost in the Foreground
Ali Cobby Eckermann, little bit long time
Andrew Burke, Mother Waits for Father Late
More titles coming soon. Order yours today!
Picaro Press New Work
Exciting new poetry from a range of emerging and established writers.
Upcoming titles include work from Jennifer Compton, Peter Lach-Newinsky, Peter Coghill, Juliet Paine, and many mor
Gil Scott Heron is On Parole, Maxine Clarke
$15.00 (72 pps)
Maxine Clarke is a woman with something 'very real' to say ... she invites you to read, listen, and above all participate. — Alan Wearne
i love her perspectives. I love her rhythms. I love her images. I love the perspective she's steeped in. — ∏.O.
Alone at Last! Evan Jones
$15.00 (72 pps)
Maxine Clarke is a woman with something 'very real' to say ... she invites you to read, listen, and above all participate. — Alan Wearne
i love her perspectives. I love her rhythms. I love her images. I love the perspective she's steeped in. — ∏.O.
Red in the Middle, Steve Woodbury
$15.00 (72 pps)
This poetry takes you out of the comfort zone to places you avoid when you can. It connects small, distasteful deeds that we have all performed — killing a cockroach, squashing a mosquito — to big issues of ethics and fate on which we would rather speculate in the abstract than confront in real life. Reconnoiter in these pages the realms of denial. It will do you good.
— Gary Schwartz, art historian
god preserve me from those who want what is best for me
Kit Kelen
$15.00 (104 pps)
Kelen’s droll metaphysics float moodily through an especially ironic air. They are thoughtful, conceptual and worldly – a tonic for a tired world.
– Pam Brown
With wit and a mordant humour Christopher Kelen contemplates the big issues and the little moments of a lifetime, and we share with him the crazy but always appealing variousness of the world and our place in it.
– Tom Shapcott
Seeking an admirable simplicity, Kelen’s poetry is thoughtfully colloquial, but those thoughts range complexly from poetic predecessors such as Homer to the seasons and the concept of the nation. He sees poetry as the means by which ‘silence can be spoken’ and the only way of building ‘for tomorrow’.
– Dennis Haskell
Leaving the Bow: the 2008 Henry Kendall Award Anthology
$15.00 (104 pps)
Judged by Newcastle and Josephine Ulrick Prize winning poet/publisher
David Musgrave
First Prize: Louise Oxley, for 'Border Country'
Second Prize: Michael Sharkey, for 'Nothing to it'
Third Prize: Madelaine Dickie, for 'Wolves in the Head'
And many, many more. Leaving the Bow is the eleventh in a series from the Central Coast Poets, stretching back to 1989. Strong poetry, edited by Andrea Belvoir, Kelly Blaney-Murphy, Shirley Hotchkiss and Jackie Pearson.
Sunblind, Geoff Lemon
$15.00 (88 pps)
A surprising and very likely award-winning debut collection from an established Melbourne performer. Over 400 copies sold since its launch in November 2008! This one is special... and it's printed on top quality 100% recycled paper.
Depot Girl — Shé Hawke
$20.00 (168 pps)
Shé Hawke’s poetry is spontaneous, alive, gritty, lyrical. It grips with pincers, hurts and releases with an eiderdown softness. Don’t be fooled by ‘tags’ or preconceived notions. Her poetry is exciting, vibrant and deserves to be known better. Hopefully, Depot Girl will travel far beyond the depot!
— Peter Skrzynecki
When I was first faced with Depot Girl I thought: oh my gawd, not poetry, not lesbians, not a bus driving lesbian in far flung NSW, not ancient Greek myths, not another sad tale of betrayal ... Depot Girl is all these things and much, much more. It’s a rivetting, galloping, entrancing, enthralling, amazing read.
— Professor Elspeth Probyn
Reality Dreams — Ouyang Yu
$15.00 (115 pps)
These unsettling, breezily imaginative poems are reminiscent of deep-night jottings in an analysand’s bedside notebook. In Reality Dreams Ouyang Yu cooks up something much more complex than a simple surrealist recipe. Once you enter his dreamworld, his stunning imagery never lets you drift off. This poetry is perplexing, comical, sometimes elegiac, sometimes mysterious, often frankly visceral, sexy and sensual. Here, in one world-weary reverie, Australia is ‘so deadly boring, so boringly dead’ that we can only hope that a fearsome Chinese phantom might suddenly awaken the entire place by shouting thunderously loudly, ‘Onya Ouyang!’
— Pam Brown
Poetry Without Borders —
Michelle Cahill, ed. $12.50
Superb new work from Judith Beveridge, Ouyang Yu, Jude Aquilina, Boey Kim Cheng, Tatjana Lukic, Afeif Ismael. Nora Krouk, Adam Aitken, Heather Taylor Johnson, Kerry Leves, Jill Jones, Diane Fahey, Fadeel Kayat, Maria Freij, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Yahia Al-Samawy, Jane Gibian, Mark Tredinnick, Miriam Wei Wei Lo, ... and many, many more!
An abundant collection, an intelligent collection, whose poems range in focus across the personal, the cultural, the geographical, the political, the metaphysical, the ‘spiritual’.
— joanne burns
Vigorous Vernacular – Kevin Densley $12.50
New work from an exciting new voice, and at a low price to encourage risk-averse readers. Try it, and you're certain to like it.
Jack – Judy Johnson $25.00 (302 pps)
Winner the Victorian Premier's Award
*** Featured on ABC Radio National's Poetica Program ***
Judy Johnson’s Jack is right up there with the best – with Dorothy Porter’s and Les Murray’s and Alan Wearne’s.
— Chris Pollnitz
The book takes us on the ‘wild mouse’ of sea, treasure, sex and hallucination. Only great poetry — and a terrific storyteller in Judy Johnson — can do this with such panache.
— Dorothy Porter
Now available in a new edition from Picador! And also as an audio book from Bolinda Books, $29.95 at good bookstores everywhere.
Exit Wounds – Heather Taylor Johnson
$12.50 (60 pps)
Exit Wounds circulates with life and warmth. It is a mighty celebration of birth, living, and perhaps dying ... These poems are sensuous, full of precise recall, and leave the reader in a thoroughly celebrative mood.
— Thomas Shapcott
These poems on birth, motherhood, love and death have intimacy and raw warmth — and a fresh wonder at inner and outer worlds.
— Eva Sallis
Swan Song – Philip Hammial
$15.00 (103 pps)
Outlandish, fabulous episodes that delight in the implausible . . .
— Warwick Wynne
Philip's 17th volume – top quality prose poetry, at an affordable price.
tender muse
– Carolyn Van Langenberg and Shé Hawke $12.50 (72 pps)
Elegies for friends, lovers and those who have become strangers, these are poems of lost opportunities from which something else is wrested, giving rise to a reinvention of the lyric and its rediscovery in the small ironies of the present.
— Anna Gibbs
An impressive debut collaboration!
Nomadic – Judy Johnson
$20.00 (111 pps)
Judy Johnson's poems are strong and sure-footed. The world has presence: animals, voices, histories, objects are all given existence through her remarkable understanding and curiousity. This is a poetry at once worldly and refined. — Judith Beveridge
'This powerful collection deals eloquently and humanely with the difficulties of experience. There are many fine psychological studies, taking us into worlds of childhood and adult pain, while being equally sensitive to private rapture. I am struck by how much gets into these poems – how much openness, how much imagination.' — Peter Boyle
Published by Black Pepper Press — winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Award, and contains winning poems from nine major competitions including the Josephine Ulrick Prize, the Val Vallis Award, the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize.
Wing Corrections Judy Johnson
$8.00 (32 pps)
To steal and misquote from Virginia Woolf: Johnson's poems are butterfly wings threaded with steel.
— Roland Leach
Now in its third printing, Johnson's prizewinning first collection has been used in schools. Published by Five Islands Press as part of their New Poets Series 5; signed by the author on request.
Beetroot
Months navigating fat-gut submarines through a landsea of compost, they have erected phallus periscopes in this feminist garden.
Irresistible then to pull them into light from worm-dark ... equalise them in the boiling pot and afterwards scrape off old-blood barnacles, peel away each knob and hardened callous, fault lines lava under female fingers.
Unearthed at last! disarmed and adorable crimson-shiny little boys; circumcised and steaming from their bath.
Rogue Perspectives
Rob Riel $12.50 (pps)
Rob Riel's poetic intelligence has a puckish quality, a zest and a versatility of form, subject, and tone... Whether he is being playful, whimsical, ruminative or lyrical his microscopic eye for the particular and intricate offers the reader fresh images, insights, and surprises, often in the manner of a metaphysical conceit. Rob Riel could make you see weeds in pavement cracks in a new light.
— joanne burns
from Island Press
Wish
When the time finally comes
I would rather the coroner
do my autopsy backwards.
Admire the many organs
which soldiered on indifferent
to adjacent trauma, cherish
the blood which wasn't spilled,
honour those warm recesses
that the cancer couldn't reach.
Let his many forms and records
celebrate the undefeated flesh.
We are more than our wounds.
For As Long As You Burn
Rob Riel $8.00 (32 pps)
Rob Riel's poems have the distinction of being written from art and need, both. Riel is a sensualist and a romantic; he can turn on a dime towards laughter, beauty, the surreal, or simple truth. His first book is a paen to the bright gold light of our lost innocence.
— Carol Frost
From the Five Islands Press New Poets Series Six.
This Heat
Two days after the stroke
which tossed him thrashing, foam-flecked and blind across the hardwood floor, I remember my dog coming home from the vet, innocent and doomed, his wide
brown eyes filled with apology
for how his hind legs now worked so badly,
and how the shame burned me
to be loved like that.
