#Dalek & David in the Sydney Morning Herald

IP is very proud of our Poetry Series. Born out of the ashes of the Penguin Poetry Series, IP has published an impressive range of established & emerging Australian and New Zealand poets, and, last year, our first American poet, the excellent Andrew Hubbard, with his delightful Things That Get You.

Recently, we dipped our collective toe into the anthology market with two ground-breaking books that were thematically related: Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand and The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.

In the most recent anthology, which features a Who's Who of Australian poets, as well as some emerging authors, the common denominator was New Zealand based Tim Jones, who edited Voyagers with Mark Pirie. The new anthology was co-edited by Canberra poet PS Cottier. Tim and PS worked over several months with our Senior Poetry Editor, David Reiter.

Poetry publishing is always a risky business, and even more so with such a specialised focus as "speculative" work. But as Mark Pirie said of Voyagers, "prose writers have had their way for too long", and it's time we showcased poets working in that mode.

Voyagers was a Listener Book of the Year in New Zealand, and we hope that The Stars wins the recognition it deserves here in Australia. Already a critical success, The Stars made it into the Big League this weekend, with an extensive review in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times, and other Fairfax newspaper syndication hopefully soon to follow.

Peter Pierce's review is so detailed that we couldn't resist reprinting it in whole here. Thanks to Karen Hardy, Editor at the Canberra Times for making it happen! And to our Business Manager, the #Dalek, for reminding you to buy the book soon and share this posting with your networks so that you are not EXTERMINATED!!

The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.
Edited by Tim Jones and P.S. Cottier. Interactive Press. $26.

One of the most enterprising, unusual and rewarding anthologies of the last year is The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, edited by New Zealand writer Tim Jones and Australian poet PS (Penelope) Cottier. The key word in the sub-title is defined with an appropriate generality: "the speculative is the area in which we attempt to write what we can't possibly know". 

The poets included range from the 19th century to the present, a much narrower temporal span than their poems, which travel millennia into the future and across galaxies. Bearing the latter point in mind, the editors note that theirs is a book "with a wide geography and an interesting fauna". They continue: "Here be dragons, true, but also zombies (traditional and vegetarian), werewolves, swagmen, poets small enough to fit into pockets, aliens of various sorts, angels, people made mostly of spare parts, or preserved wholly in DNA, and intergalactic tradies."

The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, 

Edited by Tim Jones and P.S. Cottier. Photo: supplied

Though the book covers so much territory (and given the list above, unsurprisingly has several poems set in museums and zoos), it is tightly and wittily organised into five thematic sections, each taking its name from a notable nineteenth-century poem. The first, dealing with "space travels and related pursuits", is "We don't know where he's at" (from Banjo Paterson's "Clancy of the Overflow"); the second, "Howsoe'er anomalous", concerned with "aliens, weird creatures, surrealism and magic realism", comes from a poem as strange as any that is to be found here: Barron Field's "Kangaroo". Next – with its title from Henry Lawson – is "On the Wallaby (temporal)", whose subject is "time travel and visions of the end of the world". It is followed by "The fifth part of the earth" (Field again): "Australia in various lights".  Last is "His ghost may be heard" (Paterson – in a version of Waltzing Matilda – and the ballad is here in its entirety too), whose business is "ghosts, fairies, myths and legends".

The collection opens with the controlled whimsy of "Tea and Stars" by the always engaging John Jenkins: "The mouse travelled to the stars/in a blue teacup". John Dolce's "Job for a Hyperdrive Mechanic" works with a wry matter-of-factness: "As I recall the ambient temperature/of the angular discharge tub/airlocked the anode rod". David Adès' travel to "The Three Moons of Tenoa" ends plangently: "how unimaginable a world/with placid seas, and no capacious moons/to sing serenades by". Travel is also the affair of S.K. Kelen's brilliant parody of a tourist brochure in "Flying Toasters". This of Kursa in Beta Eridani: "booking accommodation well in advance is wise though entirely futile". This first section also contains "The Last Man Out" by David Reiter, who is also the publisher of the admirable risk-taking Interactive Press that we can thank for this book.

As promised, aliens roam in Part Two. Diane Fahey's "Silverfish" imagines the Thysaurans, while Benjamin Dodds' "Others" muses of a possible arrival from so-called outer space and then decides "Perhaps they'll simply pass us by/indifferent in sleek behemoths/on the way to a place less/parochial than here". Emilie Zoey Baker presents "The Vegetarian Zombie – the undead salad beast" – while there is homage to a master of the weird, H.P. Lovecraft, in Jude Aquilina's "Cthulhu Calls". Jan Napier's "Poets in Pockets" shows how "they shrill and argue/like an aggravation of lorikeets", while there are poems by Philip Salom and Lisa Jacobson about Daedalus, the space traveller who flew too close to the sun. A number of the poems in The Stars Like Sand were invited. Much to the editors' pleasure, one of those who accepted was Les Murray, whose superb poem "The Future" begins: "There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there/but it is not about it. Prophecy is not about it … Even the man we nailed to a tree for a lookout/said little about it".

In this splendid anthology, that entertains from start to finish, we find such colonial poets as J. Brunton Stephens in "The Courtship of the Future" (AD 2876) depicts a world where – even though people coupling have been "taught to draw the whole soul though/A foot of gutta-percha tubing"– sexual misconduct has not been eradicated. Tim Sinclair'svision of the future in "Silent City" is quietly mournful: "There is no sunrise or sunset in the city,/just a uniform, sourceless glow". In "The End of the World", Lawson's contemporary Victor Daley reveals a peevish and disappointed God who brushes Man off his knees: "With all its glories ripe/The Earth passed, like a spark/Blown from a sailor's pipe/Into the hollow dark". The Stars Like Sand shows us, in the work of the more than 80 poets included, much of that illimitable dark, as well as the flights of fancy and hope that can give brief and brilliant illumination. Seek out this book – admirable, and one of a kind.

Publisher David P. Reiter. Photo: Karen Hardy

Rod Usher's "Sly humour, understated lament"

Judith Quaempts reviews Rod Usher's Convent Mermaid, in The Internet Review of Books

Rod Usher has authored two previous poetry collections, three novels, and three non-fiction titles. His second novel, Florid States, was short-listed for the MIND Book of the Year Award in the UK, and his work appears regularly in leading literary magazines and anthologies. He has worked as a journalist, is a former literary editor of The Age, former chief-sub-editor of The Sunday Times, London, and a former senior writer for TIME magazine in Europe. 


No surprise then that his third poetry collection, Convent Mermaid (Interactive Press, The Literature Series) is filled with imagery and wit, loss and sadness, themes universal to us all. 

“First Hotel,” opens the collection, taking us on a wild ride from our ‘First Hotel,’ to arrival in the world. “If I Go First,” is the last poem, about dying and what we might hope for those we leave behind.

Many of Usher’s poems begin in a humorous vein and end on a serious note. One example is, “If Not More.” Here, a Cro-Magnon man enjoys the simple comforts of his cave while thinking of retiring from long days of hunting, though his wife is against the idea because she doesn’t want him ‘getting in her way’ all day. His children want to ‘move up a rung,’ and modernize the cave. The reader sympathizes while smiling – his predicament isn’t so different from twenty-first century concerns – until the final lines, when this husband and father ruminates on the meaning of beauty and we realize there are more important things in life than, ‘moving up a rung.’

One of my favorites is the deceptively simple, “Hard Rain,” an understated lament of loneliness and sadness over the loss of a pet:

tongue-lashes the bedroom window
water talking its way in
through the unsnug frame,
pooling on the tile floor.
I ought to get up, I say,
do some caulking with the red towel
that dried the dog before…

As in all good poetry, Usher’s poems contain more than meets the eye. His sly humor shines often, as in the title poem, “Convent Mermaid.” A modest, convent-bred girl sheds her clothes to swim in the nude. She is far enough from shore that a voyeur cannot see anything of note, but then he calls out with a request to take a photograph. At such a distance, she thinks, what could it matter? 

Guesstimating distance to darkness of pine,
She treads the wrapping water, shrugs.
Once more she is supine.
He clicks before shyness can its shell resume,
Before Convent Mermaid has time to remember
Our camera has zoom.

Geoff Page Reviews B N Oakman's Second Thoughts

Geoff Page, Poetry Editor at the Canberra Times, has provided an in-depth review of B N Oakman's latest IP title, Second Thoughts.

B.N. Oakman's Second Thoughts is a very different sort of book – much shorter for a start and a tight collection of free-standing poems. Some are related by subject matter, e.g. the poet's deep appreciation of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado (1875-1939) and Spain more generally. Others have a reasonably savage political edge; still others are love poems to his partner, Barbara, who has been prone to serious illness in recent years.

Nearly all the poems are strongly affecting emotionally, partly as a result of Oakman's unusual skill with last lines. These can turn quite suddenly in a new and disconcerting direction – or brutally sum up what we've just seen. This directness of feeling, along with Oakman's leftish political edge and fluency with different linguistic registers, brings to mind the early poetry of Bruce Dawe when he was making his mark on the somewhat conservative Australian poetry establishment of the mid-1960s.

Two early poems stand out in this regard – Neurosurgery and Watching TV News in Madrid, All Saints Day 2011. The first reminds us how, when visiting a loved one in hospital, we can also be deeply upset by the situation and fate of other patients we don't even know. Neurosurgery is constructed of simple observations, cleverly arranged, e.g. the rapid plot development in: "She'll be dead by now / The woman with bright curly hair / The one I saw in Admissions / She and her man and her boy and her girl." Later, the poet sees the woman's empty room and senses the impact her death has had on all three members of her family. The poem concludes: "And then I returned to another room to sit beside another bed / And I took a woman's hand in mine / And gripped it / Hard / Too hard / Much too hard".

The second poem, Watching TV News in Madrid ... is one of several set in Spain, often dealing with the impact of the Spanish Civil War.  Oakman watches an old man on the television screen whose "words defeat my  feeble Spanish". He is looking through graves recently excavated in "a town overrun by rebels early in the war. / The weeping man is Rafael Martinez. / He is 89 years old. He's searching for his father."

Among the other 47 poems in Second Thoughts, there are many of comparable quality. Don't read them in a coffee bar; you might well embarrass yourself by shedding justified but unseemly tears.

iBooks Author and Kindle Creator software battle it out for supremacy

Apple and Amazon continue to battle it for the educational and children's market.

iBooks Author is now in version 2.2, and it's still the product to beat, despite Amazon's new Kindle Kids' Book Creator, and, more recently, Kindle Textbook Creator.

The overall strategy for all three products is to simply the process of moving from standard files authored in Word, Pages or Adobe Acrobat to eBook formats that mimic the open-source ePub3 format. Authors can easily import, lightly edit and publish their files to the respective Apple or Kindle platform, and then sell, sell, sell.

But there is a cost to this ease of publication. Both Apple and Amazon restrict the commercial use of the published files to their stores. You can retain the file for use on your devices, or even give it away, which is fine for university lecturers seeking an easy way to publish and distribute e-course notes. But for academics (or children's authors) who want to cash in on their texts, they'll have to be satisfied with Apple or Amazon holding exclusive distribution rights.

Truth is, Apple's iBooks Author leaves the Kindle software products in the dust in terms of functionality. Once you have your text in iBooks Author, it's easy to add interactivity and multimedia elements. Kids' Book Creator allows you to add "text popups", making text on the page easier to read through magnification, but that's it. And Textbook Creator has NO added functionality other than adding or deleting pages: you simply import your pdf and publish to the Kindle Store. It is only in beta version, but let's hope for more in the polished version.

There ARE ways of creating enhanced eBooks for kids and students outside iBooks Author and the new Kindle tools without having to grant Apple or Amazon exclusive rights to your content, and I'll be addressing this in the latest version of Your eBook Survival Kit, now in development. (pssst... owners of the current version will get the update for free!) The Kit is available in our new online Store.

2015: a good year for rights sales for IP?

A crucial element in any publisher's survival is rights sales, and 2015 may prove to be a good year on this front for IP.

We're pleased that the Australia Council selected us as one of only a few publishers to participate in a delegation to South Korea and Taiwan commencing 4 February when David flies in to Seoul for three days of meetings organised by Austrade. As well as meeting with matched Korea publishers, he'll visit what is essentially a shopping centre where publishers' offices are located along with bookshop outlets opened to the public. What an interesting concept!

From 8-13 February, the delegation will be in Taiwan, again meeting with matched publishers. But this time the venue will be the Taiwan International Book Exhibition (TIBE), one of the largest book fairs in the world. IP will co-locate in the Australia Council booth, where Austrade Taiwan will coordinate meetings and IP titles will be on display. Our Taiwan agency, Nurnberg, will also assist with the itinerary of meetings.

As you can see, IP will be in good company at the TIBE!

For the second year in a row, IP's been selected to attend the China-Australia Publishers' Forum in Beijing. The focus this year will be on children's and young adult publishing, so our IP Kidz titles and Glass House Books for YA will be showcased. David is planning to build on agreements already signed from negotiations last year and will extend his stay with additional meetings with publishers in Shanghai organised by Nurnberg. The staff at the Australian Embassy in Beijing have been very helpful once again, and we want to express our appreciation for all they are doing to make IP visible to the huge Chinese market.

Throwthebook.org reviews Robert Cox's A Compulsion to Kill

We're pleased to support a new online reviews site: throwthebook.org. The way that it works is that we let them know about new releases, and they let their database of reviewers know that the titles are available to review. After they receive an expression of interest, they let us know the prospective reviewer's details, and we send the book to them. That system works well for us by ensuring we send out review copies only to people interested in the book.

We've just received our first review, that being of Robert Cox's A Compulsion to Kill, and we're happy to let Lorraine Cobcroft's review speak for itself:

"Cox includes stories of ''the cannibal convict'', Alexander Pearce; sadistic sexual predator and baby-killer, Thomas Jeffrey; Charles Routley, who burnt one of his victims alive; Broughton and McAvoy, cannibal convicts; Rocky Whelan, who killed five men in just twenty-four days; and John Haley, who killed three people in fits of rage.

Robert Cox claims most of these stories have never been told before. Certainly they have not been related in such graphic detail nor with such impressive accuracy. Cox has clearly researched extensively and diligently and has uncovered a wealth of information about the lives and characters of the killers, as well as about their gruesome deeds.

This book has been described as ''a supremely dramatic page-turner in the true-crime genre''. I would not agree that it is either ''supremely dramatic'' or ''a page-turner''. I found it to be almost text-book/thesis style, but certainly intriguing and insightful. Careful footnotes and a detailed bibliography evidence the extent of research carried out and give the reader confidence in the accuracy of the information. Where opinions, theories or suppositions are advanced, they are clearly documented as such.

A lover of stories from history―especially Australian history―I opened this book with high expectations. I was not disappointed. Cox exposes much interesting detail of life in early Australia, the treatment of convicts, and the effect of that treatment on the minds of some of our most notorious murderers. He delves into the investigative methods used by police and presents newspaper reports and witness statements substantially as originally written, enabling the reader to appreciate the language used at the time and the reporting conventions observed by various newspapers.

Cox holds nothing back when describing the methods used by cold-blooded killers and their butchering and eating of victims' body parts. He covers hangings in grim detail. He presents a frighteningly accurate picture of life in an era when cruel and inhuman punishments were inflicted for relatively minor transgressions and persecution so hardened some men that they lost all respect for human life, if, indeed, these monsters ever possessed any. The stories are unapologetically grisly and horrifying, but this is history as it should be told. In the words of author Douglas Lockhart, it is told '...with the facts of a past savagery skilfully handled and accurately portrayed'."

2014 IP Rolling Picks Winners & Commended

This is Year 2 of our Rolling Picks competition that takes entries from February to August each year and awards winners in up to five categories in December.

Thanks to the authors who entered over the year, and a special congratulations to the winners and commended in their respective categories.

Winner, Best Fiction

Kafiristan by Ron Howard. The judges were impressed by Howard's successful transition from travel writing to fiction, and the depth of his insights into Afghanistan culture and political. Certainly a book for its time.

Winner, Best Creative Non-fiction 

A Compulsion to Kill by Robert Cox. Veteran Tasmanian historian created a real page-turner here, getting into the minds of our first serial killers, uncovering the past with a thoroughly researched and documented book.

Winner, Best Poetry



Second Thoughts by B N Oakman. In his second title with IP, B N Oakman showed a impressive scope of subject matter, while always remaining accessible to the reader.

Highly Commended, Best Poetry



Convent Mermaid by Rod Usher. Usher's work had a depth of subject matter and insight that rewards careful and multiple readings.

Winner, Children's / YA



The Handkerchief Map by Kiri English-Hawke. Originally crafted when she was in high school, this Holocaust novel in its second edition penetrates the psyche of people caught up in the horrors of World War II.

Winner, Best First Book



Furniture is Disappearing by Gemma White. In her first poetry volume, White impressed the judges with her mature eye and controlled craft.

IP Rolling Picks will be open again for entries in February, and, for the first time, authors world-wide will be eligible not only to publish with IP but to have their works considered in the competition.

We look forward to your entries in 2015, and wish everyone a healthy a safe holiday season and a very productive and creative New Year!