The Hazards by Sarah Holland-Batt, Publishing June 2015 Embargoed until May 27th
Poetry | ISBN: 978 0 7022 5359 1 | June 2015 | B-format paperback | 112 pp | $24.95
From the award-winning author of Aria comes The Hazards, a dazzling, inventive and highly anticipated collection of poetry.
Rapidly acquiring an international reputation as a leading Australian poet of her generation, Sarah Holland-Batt wrote the poems in The Hazards during stints living in New York and Rome, and has recently returned to the country after a prestigious fellowship at the Yaddo Colony in New York. Poems from the collection have appeared in The New Yorker (see O California, overleaf), Poetry and other major international magazines, and Spanish translation rights to the collection have already been sold in advance of publication.
Opening with a vision of a leveret’s agonising death by myxomatosis and closing with the image of a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, The Hazards reflects a predatory world rife with dangers both real and imagined. Its cosmopolitan poems traverse diverse geographical territory – from haunted postcolonial landscapes in Australia to vicious animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua – and engage everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure and extinction. Divided into four sections that travel through the successive brutalities of history and the cyclical ferocity of the natural world to more private and personal spheres, the collection reveals a lasting fascination with the twin engines of generation and annihilation, and the persisting insurgency of memory. Holland-Batt’s poems are sites where these urgent and competing forces inevitably converge, and are marked, always, by a keen awareness of the ephemerality of our season on earth. Charged with fierce imagination and swift lyricism, The Hazards inhabits this unsettling terrain with a forensically clear gaze, unafraid to veer straight into turbulence.
SARAH HOLLAND-BATT
Sarah Holland-Batt was born in Southport, Queensland, in 1982 and grew up in Australia and the United States. She is the recipient of Yaddo, MacDowell and Hawthornden fellowships, an Asialink Literature Residency, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours.
Her first book, Aria (UQP, 2008), won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize, and the FAW Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted in the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Queensland Premier’s Judith Wright Calanthe Award.
Holland-Batt holds an MFA from New York University, where she was the WG Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar from 2010–2011, and also studied literature and writing at the University of Queensland. She is presently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Queensland University of Technology and the Poetry Editor of Island.
PRAISE FOR ARIA
‘Aria is one of the most accomplished first volumes I have read in a long time and Holland-Batt is a poet worth taking special note of.’ The Australian
‘A stunning first book is always exciting: Aria by Sarah Holland-Batt is a joy to read, she appears to be a major poet from the start.’ The Age
O California
I want to wake in the lagoon of the sky
where sunlight binds the mutilated palm-tree dawn
like duct tape, an aerial shot rolling and rolling
out of town in the muffled trunk of a brown panel van
along the death roads, the desert roads, the hairpin
turns, California, the desert silvering in my eye
like a coyote, I want to swim in the jewel-jade pool
of your lonesome foothill vowels,
stretch out under the mirroring clouds
like a million rooftop deckchairs, feel
that blankness unfurl in my mind like luxury,
California, your beautiful blankness, your sheen.
O, shake me a basil gimlet at Silver Lake
and tell me about your tattoos, hermana, how death
is that bad tooth wobbling in my head,
in my head, California, that skyline that breaks
into backdrop hills I know like nostalgia, pink saguaro
and sumac, the ripe berries smashed like bodies,
each ragged cactus cross hoisting up against a silver
desert screen, California, and night that goes on like a drive-in,
palms exploding like napalm, fireworking over everything.
I want to ride the long smooth tan body
of California, I want to eat the bear of the flag
of California, I want to roll like a corpse off the highway
of your chase scenes, I want my perfect teeth
preserved, California, my teeth buried
in the earth like a curse, California, and won’t you show me
where the bodies are kept, California,
won’t you show me, show me, show me.
From The Hazards by Sarah Holland-Batt.
Published by UQP, June 2015.
First published in The New Yorker (February 23, 2015).
Jessica Dean Marketing UQP
