Carrying the World

ABIA and Indie award winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke (author of Foreign Soil and the forthcoming memoir The Hate Race) is one of Australia's most innovative and celebrated poets.

A haunting visit to the International Museum of Slavery, in Liverpool England. A feisty young black girl pushing back against authority. The joy and despair of single parenthood. A love-hate relationship with words.

This collection brings the best of a decade-long international poetry career to the page.

About the Author

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent and the author of the poetry collections Gil Scott Heron Is on Parole and Nothing Here Needs Fixing. Maxine's short fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published in numerous publications including Overland, The Age, Meanjin, The Saturday Paper and The Big Issue.

Her critically acclaimed short fiction collection Foreign Soil (2014) won the ABIA for Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2015, the 2015 Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction, and Maxine was also named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists for 2015, as well as being shortlisted for the Matt Richell Award for New Writing at the 2015 ABIAs and the 2015 Stella Prize. A collection of Maxine's poetry Carrying The World, her memoir The Hate Race and her first children's picture book The Patchwork Bike will be published in 2016.

Review by Caroline Baum

Maxine Beneba Clarke is on fire. These poems sizzle and flare with radiant heat, with pride, anger, power. They are defiantly, unapologetically in your face about race, discrimination, prejudice. They are full of dreams to be lived and dreams already crushed. But no matter what colour you are, reading them is a fierce, energising experience.