Lose yourself in an evening of poetry with poets Bron Bateman, Nadia Rhook and Andrew Sutherland in-conversation with Alan Fyfe.

The evening will be a celebration of three new collections.

Free event but bookings essential. Start time is 6.45pm for refreshments, presentation starts at 7.00pm. Please note, this session is for adults and will contain strong themes and strong language.

Blue Wren by Bron Bateman:
A collection that speaks of the roar inside the woman, these poems are structured around a suite of Frida Kahlo paintings. They are love poems, poems of tenderness and anger, queer passion and fulfilment, and maternal gratitude. They are a powerful way of healing, of reclaiming the past, and of embracing the beauty of now.

Second Fleet Baby by Nadia Rhook:
Drawing on the energies of 18th century English convict women, including Rhook’s own ancestors, Second Fleet Baby opens raw questions of belonging. In this collection, ‘mother’ is narrated as a long process of becoming. Through stories of childhood, fertility, and of nurturing new life during a pandemic, Rhook casts off the patriarchal weight of history, pulling origins ‘from the seabed to the surface’.

Paradise (point of transmissions) by Andrew Sutherland:
This brilliant debut collection examines a ‘haunted’ Queer and HIV-positive identity. It follows an HIV diagnosis and a departure from Singapore as the poet moves from being secretive about his HIV status, towards living a more public life, in which living openly with HIV is characterised by the queer longing toward both resilience and transformation.

Alan Fyfe:
Alan Fyfe is a Jewish writer originally from Mandurah, the unceded country of the Binjareb People, whose verse and prose can be found in Westerly, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal, and Cottonmouth. He was an inaugural editor of UWA creative writing journal, Trove, and a prose editor for American web journal, Unlikely Stories.

Alan is a winner of the Karl Popper Philosophy Award, was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, was commended in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, and has been selected as a WA Poets’ Inc Emerging Poet for 2022 / 23. His first novel, T, received shortlistings for both the T.A.G Hungerford Prize (Australia) and the Chaffinch Press Aware Prize (Ireland). T will be published by Transit Lounge in September 2022.

Alan is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, where he is writing a novel in chiastic structure. His writing is informed by ethical and existential philosophy and the study of formal structures which exist at the intersection of poetry and prose. His work covers Jewish history and spirituality, vernacular Australian dialect, bogan mythology, and drug writing.

“I really think that there is nothing else currently being written in Perth that is quite as exciting as Alan’s work.” – Lucy Dougan