Five Islands Press

Invite: The first launch of Lisa Jacobson’s ‘The Sunlit Zone’

mick — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:19:07 +0000

… will take place at Readings Bookstore Carlton next Thursday, from 6:30pm.

The Sunlit Zone

mick — Fri, 11 May 2012 02:10:22 +0000

The Sunlit Zone is a moving elegy of love and loss, admirable for its narrative sweep and the family dynamic that drives it. A risk-taking work of rare, imaginative power.

The Sunlit Zone combines the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect pitch of true poetry. A darkly futuristic vision shot through with bolts of light. Brilliant, poignant, disconcerting.
- Adrian Hyland, author of Kinglake 350 and Diamond Dove:

This novel in verse, at once magical and irresistible, draws us in to a vivid future. In Lisa Jacobson’s telling, the Australian fascination with salt water and sea change is made over anew. Romance holds hands with science and takes to the ocean.
- Chris Wallace-Crabbe, author of The Domestic Sublime and By and Large.

Lisa Jacobson

mick — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:57:17 +0000

Lisa Jacobson’s The Sunlit Zone was short-listed for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth, was published by Five Islands Press in 1995 and short-listed for the National Book Council Awards. She has been awarded the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, The HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Prize, a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, and an Australia Council Grant to complete her next poetry collection.
Her poetry and fiction have been published in Australia, New York and London. She has studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe. She shares a bush block in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.
Please refer to www.lisajacobson.org and www.facebook.com/TheSunlitZone for further information.

Martin Duwell of Australian Poetry Review

mick — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:24:28 +0000

… recently explored Another Fine Morning in Paradise. http://www.hotsdots.com/poetry/2012/05/michael-sharkey-another-fine-morning-in-paradise/

Tom Collins Poetry Prize:

mick — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:56:24 +0000

We are yet to formally congratulate Claire Potter for taking home the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. You can read the winning poem ‘Three Steps Outside The Tab’ via this link: http://fawwa.org.au/?p=1039

Invite: Michael Sharkey is also launching Another Fine Morning in Paradise in Sydney

mick — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 23:20:23 +0000

… the launch will be taking place in the late afternoon of April 1 at the Ben Ledi Room, Glebe Library.

Michael Sharkey

mick — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:24:58 +0000

Michael Sharkey has worked in publishing and in the public service, and has taught science and mathematics in high schools, and literature, writing, and rhetorical analysis in several universities in Australia, New Zealand, China and Europe. He has edited an anthology of Australian humour and contributed biographical essays, books reviews and articles on literary topics to many publications. He was Chairman of the New England Writers Centre from 1993 until 2012, and for several years coordinating editor of Ulitarra magazine. Since the early 1970s, his poems have appeared in periodicals, newspapers and anthologies in Australia and elsewhere, some in translation; many also appear on the Internet.

Another Fine Morning in Paradise

mick — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:44:32 +0000

Deb Matthews-Zott wrote of Sharkey’s previous book: ‘The Sweeping Plain dismantles the architecture and reconstructs the minutiae and epiphanies of contemporary life with a lyrical wit.’

Geoff Page has remarked on Sharkey’s Swift-like satire, and Martin Duwell has declared, ‘Almost nothing in Michael Sharkey’s previous work… prepares us for the shock of how good, how sheerly enjoyable, The Sweeping Plain is.’

Another Fine Morning In Paradise, Sharkey’s first collections since The Sweeping Plain, recounts the droll customs of suburban and rural Cockaigne, the existential states of earthly and other paradises, and re-imagines a poet’s fragmented Australia. Isolation, loss and heartbreak are never far from these projections of the good life, in poems that characteristically celebrate endurance with compassion, allusiveness and wit.

‘Elegance in plain clothes, that’s Michael Sharkey.’ – Simon Patton in Island

Invite: Michael Sharkey’s launch of Another Fine Morning in Paradise

mick — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:09:58 +0000

… will be taking place at Collected Works Bookshop on the 15th of February.

Invite: Mal Mckimmie’s launch of The Brokenness Sonnets I-III & Other Poems

mick — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:24:25 +0000

… will be taking place on December 9th at the Wheeler Centre.