I woke to drink Kopi O kosong, which is / Bahasa Melayu for black coffee with no sugar. The coffee / is thick and rich and sludgy and I like it / best when it is brewed with chicory /root — / earthy and bitter and slightly sour.

After reading over six hundred entries, and from a shortlist of eight outstanding poems, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2023 — Elena Gomez, Andy Jackson, Autumn Royal and Toby Fitch — have selected three winners.

Corruption and inequality. The rise of persecuted cults / and their role interpreting wildfires and crop failures. / How this was possible by loss of conviction in science / and technology, while everywhere roads and engines / and hydraulics were taken for granted.

Later, it was hypothesised / my little sister had been lying in / the sun too long. There was / a local cricket game on, / and she was stomach-down, / fingerpainting paths of kikuyu / out near the boundary line.

Every creature ever. Every single one was there./ Every animal that ever existed. Everyone / who ever existed. All life of the animal kingdom / but without hierarchies. A kingdomless kingdom.

in larapuna, the bay is fired orange / and my foremothers are in the wind

They’d rather you be inscrutable than difficult. / They’d rather you be impassive than original. / They’d rather you be enlightened than ambiguous. / They’d rather you be opaque than unpredictable.