Blakwork

WINNER - 2019 Queensland Literary Awards (Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection
WINNER - 2019 Mascara Avant-Garde Literary Award
SHORTLISTED – 2019 Prime Minister's Literary Awards (Poetry)
SHORTLISTED – 2019 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (Indigenous Writing Prize)
SHORTLISTED – 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year
LONGLISTED – 2019 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal

A stunning mix of memoir, reportage, fiction, satire, and critique composed by a powerful new voice in poetry. Alison Whittaker's BLAKWORK is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge; an incomprehensible loss, and the poet's fearless examination of the present.

Whittaker is unsparing in the interrogation of familiar ideas – identifying and dissolving them with idiosyncratic imagery, layering them to form new connections, and reinterpreting what we know.

'Alison Whittaker's second book, Blakwork is a bold mix of poetry, micro-fiction, memoir and critique, and a follow-up to her award-wining debut poetry collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire...Whittaker has drawn on the strength of past generations to become a strong blak woman in contemporary Australia, and readers are gifted her insights into growing up blak. With a unique style of writing, she bravely unpacks themes such as colonisation and Aboriginal rights in Australia.' — Karen Wyld, Books+Publishing

'The way Gomeroi words are always bursting through the English in Blakwork feels more like the future than the past. It's surely one of the key books in our current Aboriginal literary and linguistic renaissance.' — Gregory Day, Australian Book Review, Books of the Year 2018

'Whittaker literally and figuratively demonstrates the subtle – yet radical – ways in which poetry may influence perceptions.' — Autumn Royal, Overland Literary Journal

'Blakwork expands horizons of possibility beyond instrumentalised domains, and, in its own brilliant ways, this book is an act of war, its sounds and shapes acting as both chthonic echoes and epistemological landmarks.' — Dan Disney, World Literature Today