The Hazards

Spanning poems written in the United States, Central America, Europe and Australia, The Hazards is a dazzling and inventive new collection from award-winning poet Sarah Holland-Batt. Opening with a vision of a leveret's agonizing death by Myxomatosis and closing with a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, Holland-Batt reflects a predatory world rife with hazards both real and imagined.

Her cosmopolitan poems careen through diverse geographical territory - from haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua, the still Danish interiors of Hammershoi and the serial killer stalking Long Island Sound - and engage everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure and extinction. Charged with Holland-Batt's mercurial imagination and swift lyricism, this unsettling and darkly intelligent collection inhabits an uncertain world with a questioning eye and clear mind, unafraid to veer 'straight into turbulence'.

About the Author

Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of Aria, which won a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry, the Arts A.C.T. Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the F.A.W. Anne Elder Award, and was short-listed in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards for Poetry. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Queensland University of Technology and the poetry editor of "Island." She has had international writing residencies in the U.S., Japan, and Italy.