Loretta Smith

To an observer I am simply a sleeping patient in a hospital bed in recovery. One of rows and rows and rooms full of us. But what small miracles are occurring? How do we right ourselves, our physical bodies, and bring the rest—psyche, soul, ether—into alignment? Protection is required lest one surfaces with fault lines …

Loretta Smith is renowned as the bestselling author of A Spanner in the Works, the biography of Alice Anderson, the ‘garage girl’. Now in Corpus in Extremis, Loretta shares the details of her own fascinating and incredible life; a life in which she has had to negotiate the pain, physical restrictions, and medical interventions of Osteogenesis Imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease.

She shows that despite being a patient for a lifetime, she has survived, and even thrived with an imaginative brain more agile than her body. You will be charmed, challenged, and will laugh out loud at her wit and ingenuity and as she embarks on travel, engages in work, grapples with family and relationships and takes up creative endeavours, all while enduring continuous medical treatments.

Loretta explores what it is to reside in a body pushed to the extreme; what it is to be human, to be fractured, to be whole and to heal. She lucidly argues that nobody escapes being disabled, disenfranchised or othered in one way or another.

As long as we stand in light there is always shadow, always something to challenge truth, justice, knowledge, physical and mental wellbeing. As humans we are at once strong, yet vulnerable, immutable and forever changing.

Corpus in Extremis is an extraordinary story of survival and resilience against considerable challenges centred around Smith’s brittle bones. Despite all, she tells her memoir with vigour and good humour taking the ‘dis’ out of disability and wiping the floor with it.
—Sara Hardy, author of The Unusual Life of Edna Walling and A Secretive Life

This exquisitely written memoir tells compelling tales about broken bones and heartbreak, as well as about one extraordinary woman’s strong-willed and creative mind and quiet courage. While Smith navigates difficulties unimaginable to most of us in her everyday, she’s woven out of their painful threads such a vital story of a passionately lived life that I found it difficult to part with the book when it came to an end.
—Lee Kofman, author of The Writer Laid Bare and Imperfect

11 JUNE 2024 | ISBN 9781922964069 | Paperback | 200 pages | 152 mm x 228 mm

Suniti Namjoshi

Shouldn’t there be a bridge from the known to the unknown?

In this exquisite elegy, Suniti Namjoshi reflects on the life of her sister Bharati, their overlapping yet disparate lives, their nearness and distance, and what it means to belong and to be valued.

The two sisters love one another and they love birds; but they live on different continents and think in different languages. Is this what sisterhood is really about – to acknowledge difference and still to understand and to care?

This richly textured book with its tender and elegant language is full of both joy and grief. It is a generous yet poignant invitation from the author to us to contemplate our own experiences.

If the casual, implacable insolence of death could be answered by building a monument or by writing an elegy, perhaps it would do till language crumbled and the edifice fell.

JUNE 2024 | ISBN 9781922964083 | Paperback | 120 pages | 128 × 198 mm

Endorsements

“A beautiful book about the vagaries and strengths of sisterly love. A many-faceted gem.”
—Susan Varga, novelist, poet, biographer, author of Rupture

“A deeply moving, genre-disrupting, passionate work, studded with gem-like lines, from the pioneering and always surprising Suniti Namjoshi.”
— Ruth Vanita, author of Love’s Rite, Memory of Light and A Slight Angle

“It's full of wisdom and love, and sorrow, and loss. And yes, humour.”
— Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence

“Suniti Namjoshi in this deeply soul-searching elegy for her beloved sister Bharati has gifted the world with a testimonial to what is the pure essence of truth and love.”
—Revd Julie Lipp-Nathaniel

“Suniti Namjoshi will make you cry and smile, at times together. Like the swoop of a swallow, her prose glimmers and astounds. A luminous story of love, loss, and the fragility of relationships. And that fleeting thing, life.”
—Bijal Vachharajani, children’s author and editor

Sandy Jeffs

Sandy Jeffs was born in Ballarat in 1953. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1976, a time when recovery was seen as unlikely. She was in and out of institutional care for 15 years, including at the infamous Larundel Psychiatric Hospital.

Sandy was among the first to start speaking publicly about living with a mental illness, and much of her writing - including eight volumes of poetry - has been about her struggle to live a full life. She is well-known as a community educator, speaking to doctors and psychiatrists, at community health centres, and educational institutions. She has been honoured in the Victorian Honour Roll of Women, Her Place Women’s Museum, and with an OAM in 2020.

Flying with Paper Wings offers insights into madness – medical, social, personal – as well as disturbing reflections on its causes and its care. It is also a story of how poetry can become a personal saviour in the face of nearly irresistible forces. This edition is an updated edition based on the original text.

Read this exceptional book. It takes you beyond your own narrow terror towards something that might be called insight.
—Helen Elliott, The Age

Awards:

Highly Commended Certificate in the Human Rights Commission’s Non-Fiction Award 2010
SANE Book of the Year 2010
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award, 2010

MARCH 2024 | 9781925950946 | Paperback | 152 x 229mm | 278 pages

Susan Hawthorne

Do we want to live in a world without birdsong? The pesticides, the coal mines, the clear-felling forestry industry, the industrial farmers are destroying the earth with their insistence on profit. But what point is profit on a dead and silent planet?

In this enlightening yet devastating book, Susan Hawthorne writes with clarity and incisiveness on how patriarchy is wreaking destruction on the planet and on communities. The twin mantras of globalisation and growth expounded by the neoliberalism that has hijacked the planet are revealed in all their shabby deception.

Backed by meticulous research, the author shows how so-called advances in technology are, like a Trojan horse, used to mask sinister political agendas that sacrifice the common good for the shallow profiteering of corporations and mega-rich individuals.

The biotechnologists see the lure of cure, rising share prices and profits.

She details how women, lesbians, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees and the very earth itself are being damaged by the crisis of patriarchy that is sucking everyone into its vortex. Importantly, this precise and insightful volume also shows what is needed to get ourselves out of this spiral of destruction: a radical feminist approach with compassion and empathy at its core.

Shame is an emotion of the powerless because they cannot change the rules.

The book shows a way out of the vortex: it is now up to the collective imagination and action of people everywhere to take up the challenges Susan Hawthorne shows are needed.

This is a vital book for a world in crisis and should be read by everyone who cares about our future.

NOVEMBER 2020 | ISBN 9781925950168 | Paperback | 152 mm x 228 mm | 196 pages

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE GENDER CRITICAL COLLECTION

Fiona Place

I am seen by many as a danger. As having failed to understand the new rules, the new paradigm of successful motherhood.

A memoir and an examination of the politics of disability. Fiona Place describes the pressure from medical institutions to undergo screening during pregnancy and the traumatic nature and assumptions that a child with Trisomy 21 should not live, even though people with Down syndrome do live rich and productive lives. Fiona's son, Fraser, has become an artist and his prize-winning paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Sydney and Canberra. How does a mother get from the grieving silence of the birthing room through the horrified comments of other mothers to the applause at gallery openings?

This is a story of courage, love and commitment to the idea that all people, including those who are 'less than perfect', have a right to be welcomed into this increasingly imperfect world.

2019 | ISBN 9781925581751 | Paperback | 234 x 153 mm | 312 pp

Robin Morgan

I‘ve had me up my sleeve

I‘ve pulled me from my hat

I’ve planted myself in the audience

as the patsy I dare to decipher my tricks—

safe I can never see through me.

The Magician and The Magician's Assistant--

I‘ve been both for so long . . .

from here on in, all that’s left is the magic.

In this major new book of poems, her seventh, Robin Morgan rewards us with the award-winning mastery we've come to expect from her poetry.  Her gaze is unflinching, her craft sharp, her mature voice rich with wry wit, survived pain, and her signature chord: an indomitable celebration of life.  This powerful collection contains the now-famous poems Morgan reads in her TED Talk —viewed online more than a million times and translated into 24 languages.

Dark Matter is an unforgettable book.

2018 | ISBN 9781925581430 | Paperback | 210 x 148 mm | 82 pp

Sandy Jeffs

but I am madness

and madness is me

it holds you captive

like a hapless bunny

caught in the headlights.

In this moving collection of poems, award-winning writer Sandy Jeffs shares her journey through madness over four decades, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the motley gathering of characters at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Both delightful and insightful, playful and serious, witty and whimsical,The Mad Poet’s Tea Party provides a devastating commentary on how our society treats those with mental illness from the perspective of someone who has experienced all its interventions. It captures in poetic form the enigmas and contradiction in madness.

2015 | ISBN 9781742199498 | Paperback | 210 x 148 mm | 82 pages

Sandy Jeffs

Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Sandy Jeffs' poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying "shudders of intense fear". Yet in the midst of her rigours, she can access a voice both wild and funny. Sandy Jeffs' leavening sense of humour peoples her darkness with the sirens of the supermarket, a tinsel paradise and high-tech technicolour Armageddon. After all, God is only a word and angels, although mad, sing the wanderer into paradise.

2004 | ISBN 9781876756512 | Paperback | 200 x 132 mm | 120 pages

Susan Hawthorne

A vivid desert odyssey, The Falling Woman travels through a haunting landscape of memory, myth and mental maps. Told in three voices – Stella, Estella and Estelle – this is an inspiring story drawn from childhood memories, imagined worlds and the pressing realities of daily life.

The Falling Woman charts one woman’s journey into the heartland. It is a journey taken across the desert, into the heart of memory, and into the mythic heart, that place to which we return in times of crisis.

2003 | ISBN 9781876756369 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 270 pp

Sandy Jeffs

Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. Only a poet could make us hear the thundering whisper of insanity, the endless circling of the revolving door, the sheer practicality of whatever gets you through the night. Here are portraits of other people in wards filled with restless wanderers. In the end, it is humour, a thesaurus of monickers that enable the reader to emerge sadder, wiser, but not hopeless.

2002 | ISBN 9781876756345 | Paperback | 180 x 140 mm | 88 pages

Susan Hawthorne

Birds don't fly with leads...Safety belts are to learn with, not to live with - I'm safer on the trapeze than crossing the road. And I do that every day, often by myself.

Thirteen-year-old Avis confronts the limitations imposed on her at school. She has epilepsy and some of the teachers want to stop her participating in the sport she loves most. Susan Hawthorne captures the voice and longings of a child at the edge of self-realisation. This collection draws on the experience of epilepsy mixed with imagination, mythic consciousness and an intense realisation of life.

The language in my tongue dissolves all history. It dissolves all expectation of the future. The language in my tongue is a big red balloon.

1999 | ISBN 9781875559886 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 100 pages

Deborah Staines

Sandy Jeffs

An award-winning joint volume of poetry, Sandy Jeffs invites the readers into the world of schizophrenia in Poems from the Madhouse, while Deborah Staines presents vivid images that evoke the mythic past and the technological future in Now Millennium. Staines' sequence, Venus Port, explores the destruction of the social fabric set alongside poems of love and loss, images of video worlds as well as words that catch moments on the cusp of millennium. Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. You will emerge sadder, wiser, but also exultant in the spirit she shares with us.

1993 | ISBN 9781875559206 | Paperback | 180 x 140 mm | 124 pages