Anne Casey and Gareth Jenkins

Join us for the launch of fabulous new collections by lauded poets Anne Casey and Gareth Jenkins: Anne's Out of Emptied Cups, and Gareth's Recipes for the Disaster.

This is a free event but RSVPs are essential. Reserve your place now!

About out of emptied cups by Anne Casey

Including internationally award-winning and shortlisted pieces, out of emptied cups interrogates what it means to be a woman in a world where the female body still preordains so much for the person it contains. Deliberately weaving in and out of, and cross-referencing, each other, these poems reveal multiple perspectives on the same or related narratives.

At times unabashedly political, this book plumbs the poet’s own experiences of birth, death, loss, treatment/mistreatment and place in the world—as a woman, as an immigrant, as a parent, as a former environment journalist/author depicting the decline of our planet, as a human being questioning our treatment of others based on lines on a map and ‘so many lengths/of slick red tape’.

Collectively these poems strive to cross the boundary between body and soul. To be filled to overflowing. Emptied. To be simultaneously half-full, half-empty. To drink deeply of this one precious cup and find meaning in the traces of what remains—“lifting our hearts/out of emptied cups/and away with them/into the heavens”.

Praise for out of emptied cups

“Reading Anne Casey’s poems, I want to 'embrace the world with a desperate love’.” —Luka Bloom

About Recipes for the Disaster by Gareth Jenkins

"Gareth Jenkins’ work reads like rituals or incantations, corrupted by the manufactured nature of our modern world while constantly seeking to resist that corruption. Historicity, environmental awareness, culture and its wars: these themes and their constant transmutation dominate and destabilise the voices in his poems.

In between, the unreliability of language, an overarching self-awareness of privilege and the uncertainty of human relations make the book both alien and deeply personal. His is a project intent on an honest, heartfelt grandeur of connection, all the while haunted by the fear that such human connection is already doomed to a shallow etching of what it might be.

Recipes for the Disaster is at once bleak, mystical and strangely life-affirming; an exploration of mysteries, an excavation of hidden failures, an exhortation to be better than we have been." - Michael Aiken.

Praise for Recipes for the Disaster

"Recipes for the Disaster is intense, monolithic, and casually personable. A treasure to delve into again and again." - Michael Aiken, author of The Little Book of Sunlight and Maggots.

About Anne Casey

Originally from the west of Ireland, and living in Sydney, Anne Casey is an award-winning poet and writer. Over a 25-year career, she has worked as a journalist, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. Anne is Senior Poetry Editor of Other Terrain and Backstory literary journals (Swinburne University, Melbourne). Her writing and poetry rank in The Irish Times newspaper’s Most-Read.

About Gareth Jenkins

Gareth Jenkins has taught poetry and poetics in schools, youth centres, universities, libraries and prisons. His Masters in Psychology was spent measuring the brain's frontal positive slow wave. His doctorate explored the schizophrenic writing and artmaking of Anthony Mannix. He is the editor of The Toy of the Spirit (forthcoming in 2019 with Puncher and Wattmann), the first book-length publication of Anthony's collected writings.

Gareth's poetry and theoretical work has been widely published. His poetry-film collaborations regularly screen at festivals around the world. He makes and exhibits text-based art at Square One Studios. More of his work can be found on his site: apothecaryarchive.com. He lives in Sydney with his wife and daughter.