It always rankles with me when I discover, via conversation or interview, local prose writers who don’t read contemporary poetry. On the other hand, the Australian poets I encounter tend to read omnivorously and to keep up with other forms of their moment, not least other written forms.

What to make of this disparity: turn the other cheek? Or, perhaps tease our prose friends with what they’re missing. These past few months, for instance, such dullards might have overlooked debut releases from two young, queer, Indigenous poets: Ellen Van Neerven’s Comfort Food and Alison Whittaker’s Lemons in the Chicken Wire. Van Neerven, author of the totally original short story collection Heat and Light, has produced a slim series of minimalist, imagistic lyrics that trace over familiar highways and eating rituals. Whittaker, more engaged with disturbing the niceties of English, makes ratcheted elegies and rollicking body poems that build a new self from language. In parallel, I recently finished Writing to the Wire, an anthology of new Australian poems in response to local refugee policy, edited by two poets and critics who view their country of birth from a distance: Seoul-based Dan Disney and Macau-based Kit Kelen. While many of the poems repeat expected protests against cruelty and racism, most of them using found voices and personal narratives to offset an inhuman policy, there are a few standouts that really address what poetic form can add to the debate. Ahmed Hashim’s ‘The map’ and a number of poems by anonymous asylum seekers are haunting pieces of language.