‘Using seemingly everyday materials and sensations, Nespola hums with its lucid, uncanny tableaux of ambiguous intimacy. These audacious, haunting narratives and lyrics, peppered with ecstatic punctures and folds, know what our bodies bury and hold. They ask, “how much of myself, to save / myself, can I destroy?”. Anders Villani is a wayfinding alchemist.’
Andy Jackson
Melbourne, Naarm - I feel so very lucky to be able to travel to this beloved city and host a book event for I Lost Someone Then Found Them In My Body. I’m amazed at what a glut of fine poets walk those streets, four of which will read a poem of mine and one of their own at @the_alderman_bar this Thursday 6:30 - @no_wave_poetry (Dominic Symes), @maxinebeneba , @gayelenecarbis2025 and @belschenk Then I will visit a gallery and eat at a cafe with a friend. Thanks be to this fine city for always being so dependably arty and fun. Hope to see some of the poetry community there.
Nespola comes out today. I wrote this book as a way to examine questions that my last collection, Totality, raised, which I wasn’t ready for then, as a person or as an artist. I was ready this time.
These are the best poems I’ve written. More than that, they round off an inquiry that has fueled my practice for 15 years. Whatever else I write, I won’t write it doubtful of whether I’m capable or deserving of love.
I gave everything to this book. I hope many of you will give it something of yourselves and find that gift repaid.
Link to book in bio. Better yet, come down to @capers.thornbury may 13 from 7pm for the launch.
Covert art and vignettes by @tyler.j.arnold
Thanks to @recentworkpress for your continued support
Thanks @creative.australia for helping create the space to write these
As part of 'That Poetry Thing at Smiths', poet and author Adrian Caesar will be launching SKY WRITING, a poetry book I am honoured to have illustrated.
Adrian's passion for poetry makes this book feel alive, urgent and worth wrestling with. The story he shares is meaningful, relatable, and a timely reminder of the cost of war as this ANZAC Day approaches.
We are very grateful for the support of @vaninewbyprintmaker@paloheimo.art and @recentworkpress - thank you!
We also can't wait to celebrate Kate Maxwell's third poetry collection release, THISTLE.
AND, there's an open mic for more poetry to be shared.
If you are in Canberra, please come - it'll be a beautiful evening. More info in my insta bio.
Hope to see you at Smith Alternative, Canberra City, 7-9 pm on Monday, 20 April.
Recent Work Reading at Smith's Alternative! Hear Adrian Caesar read from his new chapbook Sky Writing and Kate Maxwell share poems from her new collection Thistle. Free entry. Don't miss it! ✨
I met Adrian when I was 18.
It was the year 2000, and I’d imagined myself studying fine art in Melbourne … but life took a different turn, and I found myself at ADFA as an Army officer cadet, studying a double major in Literature — the closest thing I could find to that creative pull.
Adrian taught me across three years, but it was his early lectures on WWI poetry that lingered. Something in them stayed with me — and over time, I’ve come to see how deeply his thinking about art and war has shaped my own practice.
We reconnected in 2021, whilst I was finally getting to study fine art in Melbourne. Adrian and his lovely wife Clare invited me to exhibit at the River of Art Festival in Moruya. In 2022, my daughter Imogen and I camped by the wild beach at Congo National Park, and I showed a series of counter-monument prints about the true cost of war.
It was there Adrian shared the story at the heart of this book — a story of love and loss, of a life in the military cut short.
That story resonated.
So when Adrian asked me to illustrate these poems, I felt both honoured… and quietly overwhelmed. I wanted to do justice to such a powerful story, written with such care. What I first recognised as that familiar ADFA cadet tendency toward procrastination was, in truth, a kind of anxious resistance — a hesitancy to fully, emotionally enter the poems.
But I got there in the end, and we are excited to launch our joint creation in Canberra on Monday 20 April.
If you’re in the neighbourhood, please join us at Smiths Alternative from 7-9 pm.
Hey friends / enemies, I’m launching my third book of poetry and I would love to have your company on May 13 @capers.thornbury 🍊 I’ll say more about the book in coming posts, but for now I couldn’t be more excited (or terrified) to share this work - the fruit of four years’ labour- with you all.
To top it off, two of my favourite poets / people will be reading with me, @timloveday_ & @eartha_davis_
Thanks @recentworkpress for making it happen
May 13
@capers.thornbury
Free entry 7PM
Negronis and poetry forever
‘There is a searing honesty and daringness, a readiness to confront the inherent complexities of our lives, in Maxwell’s third collection, but it is coupled with a very human tenderness.' - Denise O'Hagan on Thistle, a new collection by Kate Maxwell
'The poems explore the collision of romantic love with the doomed romance of military service and provide an elegiac refrain for both. Kat Rae’s artistic response to the poems expands and enhances their significance, providing a vivid and thought-provoking complementary visual experience.'
‘As affected by a work as they are by a word, as attentive to the world as they are to the body, as absorbed in other languages as they are in her mother tongue, these poems balance “lull’”and “leap”, “shadow” and “light”, “violence” and compassion. They are serious and witty, controlled and fervent, lyric and experimental. Errances is a smart, unswerving and dazzling collection.’
-Stuart Barnes
I Lost Someone and Found Them in My Body - New work from Heather Taylor-Johnson
‘Often beautiful, sometimes gruesome, always compelling. These poems speak of conflict and connection in the body, the family, and the world; the spaces where pain meets love. Read them and grow.’ - Robin Eames
Join bestie poet and author @meadipus in a conversation with me about my seventh book of poetry, I Lost Someone Then Found Them In My Body. It’s a book about art, the body, and the body as art. Expect much laughter, because we think we're hilarious together.
