Published in Overland Issue 231 Winter 2018 · Uncategorized Nakata Brophy Prize: Judges’ notes Jeanine Leane and Toby Fitch All five poems on this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize shortlist – Jazz Money’s ‘as we attack’, Kirli Saunders’ ‘A dance of hands’, Laniyuk Garcon’s ‘Remember’, Raelee Lancaster’s ‘haunted house’ and Susie Anderson’s ‘revolve’ – are testimony to the diverse work of emerging Indigenous poets, not only in the Nakata Brophy Prize submissions, but more broadly across the country. Congratulations to the shortlist and the three following poets. Runner-up ‘A Dance of Hands’, by Kirli Saunders, is a sensorial retrospective love poem best read out loud. The other runner-up, Susie Anderson’s ‘revolve’, is a subtly evolving prose poem about the moon and the speaker coming-to-terms with events. This year’s first-placed poem, Raelee Lancaster’s ‘haunted house’, whose speaker reworks an old trope unflinchingly in the face of scepticism, was a clear winner. Its organically formed structure across three parts allows it to express multiple traumas experienced and inherited by Australian Indigenous peoples, individual and collective. This prize is sponsored by Trinity College, University of Melbourne. Read the rest of Overland 231 If you appreciate Overland’s support of new writers, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Jeanine Leane Jeanine Leane belongs to the Wiradjuri people from the Murrumbidgee river. She is a poet, teacher, author and essayist who is well published in the areas of Aboriginal writing, writing difference and literary criticism. More by Jeanine Leane › Toby Fitch Toby Fitch, living on unceded Gadigal land, is poetry editor of Overland, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, and the author of eight books of poetry, including Sydney Spleen and Where Only the Sky had Hung Before. More by Toby Fitch › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.
