Description

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With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt's books of poetry up to her Stella prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia's best-known and widely read poets to American readers for the first time.

Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt's cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father's long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body's animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much loved father trying to cope with Parkinson's
Disease has touched the hearts of many people who would never usually
read a book of poetry.

The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. As John Kinsella has said, 'Holland-Batt is one of the best poets writing not only in Australia but anywhere in the world in English. This is an art of necessity, of belief, and of artisan-like commitment.'

About the Author

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Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and critic. Born in Queensland in 1982, she grew up in Australia and the United States, and has also lived in Italy and Japan. She has an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar from 2010-2011. She has received many honours and fellowships including from Yaddo and MacDowell. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. Her first book, Aria, received several literary prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and the Thomas Shapcott Prize. Her second book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. Her third book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize, the Queensland Premier's Award for State Significance and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, and was named The Australian newspaper's 2022 Book of the Year. The Jaguar was also longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the ALS Gold Medal, and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize.