High Spirits
Award-winning poet Paul Mitchell’s fourth collection is a tour-de-force. As always, he both questions and engages with matters of spirituality and religion in High Spirits, while scaling the heights and plumbing the depths of human experience. Through themes of mortality, addiction, pop culture, mystical experience, and parenting, Mitchell’s vernacular style shifts comfortably between the urbane and the deeply philosophical.
Paul Mitchell has published seven books, including a novel, We. Are. Family. (MidnightSun Publishing, 2016) and four poetry collections. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared over the last twenty-five years in publications such as The Age, The Australian, Antipodes (US), Best Australian Stories and Poems, Cordite, Griffith Review, Heat, Island, Meanjin, Overland, Rolling Stone, and Westerly. He has won, been placed or commended in many literary prizes and has developed several works for stage and screen, including co-writing the documentary Actions to Live By for the AFL, which covered the Brisbane Lions’ 2001-2003 dynasty. La Mama Theatre (Melbourne) has accepted his play, You’re the Man, for a two-week season in 2025. In 2023, Paul performed his poetry-meets-music album, My Coffin Lid, My Shield, a collaboration with Simon Mason, at Denmark Festival of Voice (WA) and Sonic Poetry Festival, Melbourne.
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