Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection

2022 Shortlist

Congratulations to the finalists!

Cover of TAKE CARE by Eunice Andrada. It is a stylised dark dark cover with two overlaid shapes in blue and cream in the centre

TAKE CARE by Eunice Andrada (Giramondo Publishing)

Judges' comments

Eunice Andrada’s confident second collection, TAKE CARE, makes plain the violence by which the patriarchy, colonialism, extractive capitalism and power squeeze the life out of the women it designates caregivers. This is a book about taking care by force and the wreckage and resistance churning in its wake.

Cover of Stasis Shuffle by Pam Brown. The cover shows a stormy grey sky over an almost empty city intersection; the book title is in yellow

Stasis Shuffle by Pam Brown (Hunter Publishers)

Judges' comments

Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle is attentive to space, to time – the time of writing, the time of our reading – to existence, the phenomenology of how ‘not every mundanity / makes it into a poem’. The poems are by turns epigrammatic, droll, and gloriously gnomic.  In an age bloated with culture industries hungry to prolong the audience’s listlessness, Pam Brown grabs you by the lapels.

Cover of accelerations & inertias by Dan Disney. It is a red and white rendering of clouds, mountains and cherry blossoms

accelerations & inertias by Dan Disney (Vagabond Press)

Judges' comments

accelerations & inertias moves with the start-stop rhythm of a taxi battling traffic in Dan Disney’s adopted Seoul. Filled with that sprawling megalopolis’ vibrance and surprise, and steeped in Korea’s poetic traditions, this is a hyperactive book for a hyperactive age.

The cover of At the Altar of Touch by Gavin Yuan Gao. Blue bordered-cover with wavy shapes in black and white and a black shape in the centre.

At the Altar of Touch by Gavin Yuan Gao (University of Queensland Press)

Judges' comments

In their debut collection, At the Altar of Touch, Gavin Yuan Gao seeks out the known world’s edge, aware that existence gains its contours from the lives comprising it. The poems are a reflection on memory and inheritance in which being forms its own world, observed through Gao’s tirelessly refractive lens.

Cover of Bees Do Bother by Ann Vickery. It's an ultra close up of the yellow and black insides of a bee hive

Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist's Carepack by Ann Vickery (Vagabond Press)

Judges' comments

In Bees Do Bother, poet Ann Vickery performs a kind of cultural studies that interrogates settler culture through the microcosm of the bee colony. Bees appear throughout the collection as specimen, motif, and homonyms. Vickery’s poems are urgent: they pulse as much with intelligence as with desire.