Recent Works
How To Read A City, Your Place of Last Resort
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In recent years, I have worked as writer and artistic director for a multi-modal collaborative project with many artists, most particularly, punk rock drummer, Richard Lawson, who has written a song cycle for string quartet. This work was recorded by Acacia Quartet and the world live premiere of the music and poetry was performed at Four Winds, Bermagui, in September 2025. Our next performance will be at Phoenix Central in May 2026, and my poetry cycle will be published in 2026.
Project components
Book — my short poetry cycle is now available at the 5 Islands Press Bookstore.
Film — a visual exploration of the themes of the project
Events — talks, readings, performances, and exhibitions
→ Listen to Acacia Quartet perform How To Read A City, Your Place of Last Resort Recorded Music Album
Read a selection at Rochford Street Review
Other Writing Projects
Reviews
The painterly long plait of memory in Loribelle Spirovski’s White Hibiscus
While her cruise ship musician is never directly named, a wider reading of Spirovski’s career makes him instantly recognisable as the classical pianist Simon Tedeschi. In the post-Covid years when White Hibiscus was written, Tedeschi also produced powerful writing, receiving the Calibre Essay Prize for “This Woman My Grandmother”. The ellipsis she creates by gently refusing to fully name him allows Spirovski to explore this partnership without deferring to Tedeschi’s celebrity. As a result, White Hibiscus remains steadfastly, Spirovski’s story.
Her use of broken lines creates a sense of dispersal not unlike Willo Drummond’s viperously seeding mangroves in ‘Propagules for Drift and Dispersal’ (p. 15). Spirovski’s prose soon resumes once the tide changes, and complex memories can safely recede.
- Elizabeth Walton, TEXT
Precarious: Poetic Edges in David Stavanger’s The Drop Off
“Stavanger gives voice to the voiceless, the way a parent might share their oxygen mask with a child during a mid-flight crisis. Here, a solid tower of a man shows his willingness to break himself down and raise his son up, so that their presence in this shattered world appears as equals, sharing the same page.
- Elizabeth Walton, TEXT
A review of Seang (Hungering) by Anne Casey
Casey’s capacity to articulate hunger not merely as a physical condition but as a tyrannical punishment is acknowledged by both Judith Beveridge and Sarah Holland-Batt. But it is also endorsed by Professor Eamonn Wall from the University of Missouri-St Louis, who finds this to be a “furious, graceful, and deeply moving work of literary witness,” (p1).
Renowned Australian poet, Henry Lawson referred to Darlinghurst prison as “Starvinghurst Gaol” (p49)—a moniker not unlike Toby Zoates’ iconic graffiti, which was painted on a nearby slum wall in the 1980s. His phrase, “Darling, It Hurts”, became a song title for Paul Kelly and The Coloured Girls. Like Kelly’s prostitute, the girl in Casey’s poem has also become a sex worker.
But where Kelly’s girl is missed by a lover, Casey’s girl grieves her infant who has died in the cell beside her (p41). Casey explicitly frames the calculated brutality of British rule during the Great Irish Famine not as a natural disaster but as a colonial crime. Like a visit to the “Scarcity Commission” (p30), the mechanisms of tyranny return like blight to the nation’s rotting potato crops. This is a poetry which witnesses starvation; it witnesses religious and cultural bans, and ultimately, it is witness to the systematic removal of children.
- Elizabeth Walton, COMPULSIVE READER
51 Alterities by Keri Glastonbury is laugh-out-loud audacity and playful
Like Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets, this collection is self-satirising, as it takes a humorous swipe at the ‘tech-bro-ligarchy’ of 2025 as well as ‘family geometries’. Titles appear inside square brackets [like this], as though the contents page has been coded and depersonalised in computer language, like Python or JavaScript. There are no titles on the poem pages themselves.
In this way, both [the monument has no plaque] and [the sun streaming through] become fragments of something removed, something pulped and irrelevant or deleted from a collection which is mostly presented unpunctuated, in duck-the-patriarchy lower case. A ‘whiff of cologne’ or a ‘mood-swing’ on ‘salad days’ comment on a culture that is coming apart, as casually as a social media status update.
- Elizabeth Walton, ARTSHUB
Joss: A History, Grace Yee
Joss began in the reading room on a State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship. While Yee’s critically acclaimed debut, Chinese Fish had the compression of her PhD research, this volume has the compression of the entire archive. Yee has casually acculturated the past with COVID, donuts and 140-character tweets. Her anti-establishment stance punctuates the patriarchy and in doing so demonstrates how to speak back to a culture that made your people a feared minority.
Joss is set around Bendigo, a gold rush town where the population of perhaps a few hundred swelled to 20,000 within a year. Around a fifth were Chinese migrants. Some were First Nations people hanging on after the forced removals and massacres of the Frontier Wars.
- Elizabeth Walton, ARTSHUB
How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up, Lisa Collyer
Beachcombing her way from rice paddies to Perth’s Crystal Palace to the Bibbulmun Track, the seamstress becomes an arborist and a luscious contemporary poet.
Collyer explores episodes in fertility as her breasts become feasts for others to squeeze and touch. A single press determines the viability of her eggs, fecundity to expiry. The panic button of the unexpected event suggests possibilities that remain in certain countries even after the overthrow of Roe versus Wade.
Yet the window Collyer chooses through autobiographical deliberations soon shatters, revealing a gaping grief of surrender to time – to the idea of viability. While the seamstress picks and unpicks the bodice of her dreams, Collyer crosses the generations. Handing the story to her grandmother, surgeons stitch her belly back from bits, and she is left with the burden of burying grief.
Short Stories
Furphy Anthology
Publisher’s note: The Furphy Anthology 2024 is a collection of the sixteen stories short-listed for the 2024 Furphy Literary Award. They are the best of the best, diverse, entertaining, challenging. This is the perfect summer book.Order a copy of the Furphy Anthology, with my shortlisted short story, “Casino”.
Essays
Living with Illness and Disability: Poised on The Pointe of Pain – ‘Nureyev’s Foot’ and Other Essays
Publisher’s note: Living with Illness and Disability – Poised on the Pointe of Pain is a collection of personal essays that brings together people living with chronic pain, illnesses and disabilities, and those caring for them.Order a copy of Nureyev’s Foot, with my creative non-fiction essay, “Bodies of Water”. This is an exploration of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder, swimming and the water cures used by Charles Darwin, as well as the classical guitar master, Andres Segovia’s performances in before the pool at an Andalusian palace.
Poetry Anthologies
Writing published in edited volumes and anthologies.
34 to 37 Degrees South — South Coast Writers
Poetry D’Amour — WA Poets - PUblisher’s Note: Poetry d’Amour Anthologies are collections of the best love poems from the Poetry d’Amour Love Poetry Contests showcasing Australian and international poets at their finest.
Discography
Music and sound work released independently or in connection with writing projects.
Seven Breaths
Vocal composition performed by Richard Lawson.Sonificatio Somnians
Piano compositions performed by Elizabeth Walton.Band project
Band project
In the news:
Arts Poëtica Fourth Birthday celebrations
Arts Hub Music and Poetry
2MBSfm Breakfast Interview
Rochford Street Review Four poems from 5 Islands Press collection
Compulisive Reader Review by Magdalena Ball
Books and Publishing Varuna (HC)