Joanne Burns

The poems in amphora seize on the miraculous moments contained in life and language, interrogating them with scepticism on the one hand, celebrating them with a comic sense of wonder on the other. The collection's focus ranges from the magical exploits of saints recalled from the poet's Catholic childhood, to her variations on the Zen koan, to the accidental 'out...

Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry The poems collected in apparently appear like visions, intensely experienced but barely real. Where does a poem come from? Over four sections, this question is considered. The first section gathers poems spring-boarding from the clues and solutions to crossword puzzles; the second recounts unsettling dreams in the...

The title of Joanne Burns' new collection Brush highlights the reader's first experience of a poem, its initial electricity; and the way the poem offers a surface of words that proceeds to reveal their possibilities or intentions. The central sequence 'road' is an animated display of the fashions of being in contemporary life—these poems are cheeky, playful, mercurial, surreal. Then...