Bonny Cassidy

Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Non-Fiction An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. Monument is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past—part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation—it traces the...

Chatelaine is a collection of poems peopled by characters who, like a family portrait, resemble one another in foxed, latent ways. Their voices stalk outside of time and place, inhabiting the genres of riddle, fragment, confession, lyric, and ekphrasis, and returning to images of metamorphosis and occupation. The poems present a mossy, alien cosmology where aeroplanes are forest-like and 'signifiers...

Final Theory is a long poem told in episodes, combining two fragmentary storylines – one following a couple as they travel through landscapes that are at different times pristine and ravaged by progress; the other portraying the sensations of a child tumbling through the ocean, encountering evidence of lost worlds. Researched and composed in countries that were once part of...

Bonny Cassidy's first book, Certain Fathoms, glimmers with precisely observed moments that make a strange place of the familiar. These poems speak not only to each other but to and of other writers: Eve Langley, John Berryman, JS Harry. Cassidy knits seemingly small phrases and events into glimpses of a vast, interconnected whole. There is a mapping-out here that is...