Disorders of the Blood
With candour and grace, Leah Kaminsky focuses her physician’s gaze with scalpel-like precision, as she probes the secrets of the body’s terrain. Exploring the vulnerability of the human condition, she examines our fragile lives as we confront our own mortality – the weakness and the strength that emerge from the tumult of illness and decline, trauma and war. Kaminsky lowers her doctor’s mask, using a deft poetic lens as she straddles the realms of science and the soul, shining light on the malady of illness. By checking her own emotional temperature, she foregrounds torment as well as resilience, creating a powerful and graceful elegy to both the living and the dead.
Leah Kaminsky, a family physician and award-winning poet and novelist, is the author of twelve books. Disorders of the Blood is her third poetry collection. Her latest novel Doll’s Eye was released in 2023 (Vintage). Her debut novel The Waiting Room won the Voss Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Helen Asher Award. The Hollow Bones won the 2019 International Book Awards in both Historical Fiction & Literary Fiction categories. Her poetry collection Stitching Things Together was highly commended in the Anne Elder and IP Picks Awards. She is the former Poetry & Fiction Editor of the Medical Journal of Australia. She has been the recipient of the Eleanor Dark Flagship fellowship, Cove Park fellowship (Scotland), McCraith fellowship, Bundanon fellowship, and has published essays, poetry and fiction internationally. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts (USA) and a BA in Literature from Deakin University.
