Maria Takolander

These dark and unnerving tales invoke the spirit of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky in their examination of the darker side of human nature. Each of the stories in The Double is unnerving and unforgettable. Ranging from rural Australia to Northern Europe and beyond, from the dark past of the Soviet era to a terrifying vision of the near future, this collection...

From award-winning and highly acclaimed author and poet Maria Takolander comes her most impressive and personal poetry collection yet. Trigger Warning is not for the fainthearted, but neither are the elemental realities of domestic violence and environmental catastrophe that these astonishing poems address. Comprised of three sections, the first summons a difficult personal history by conversing with poets— from Sylvia...

Maria Takolander's poetry presents the primitive aspects of human life in dramatic and uncompromising ways. She strips the world of easy sentiment, highlighting the visceral quality of experience, its nightmare hauntings, and its premonitions of disaster. The intensity of the poems, and their focus on the effects of violence, madness, degeneracy, despair, and birth, combine with a Gothic sense of...

It is the future, and the earth has seemingly refused to cooperate with humanity, producing only thorn-bearing plants and caustic fogs in abundance. Life is hard for those who still inhabit urban communities. For those who have chosen to live ‘off-grid’, it is subsistence at best, but at least there is some kind of independence. A woman and her son...