Extinctions
A6 32pp ISBN 0-978-0-9807718-2-4
$9.90 including postage
Extinctions is Sandra Thibodeaux’s second chapbook with PressPress. Sandra Thibodeaux is an influential and dynamic presence in Australian poetry - especially in the Northern Territory where she lives and works.
Her work is dramatic with a clear and accessible voice: ‘a sure touch with the rackety world, a spare precision and a lyrical elegance’ as Patricia Prime wrote when reviewing Delivery.
Delivery
A6 32pp ISBN: 978-0-9580367-6-4
(cover illustration by Lari Gadza)
$9.90 including postage
About Sandra Thibodeaux
Sandra Thibodeaux is a Darwin poet and playwright whose writing has been featured in national and international journals.
She has written twelve plays which have been staged as part of festivals in Darwin, Bali and Sydney, and broadcast on Radio National. In 2005, she was short-listed for the Patrick White Playwright’s Award. Sandra has published two books of poetry, the latest of these being Delivery (PressPress). Her writing has been featured in national and international journals and anthologies. In 2004, Sandra was awarded an Australia Council New Work grant for poetry and, in 2005, she was a writer-in-residence at Booranga Writers’ Centre, NSW (poetry).
Extinctions is Thibodeaux’s second collection with PressPress. In 1996, she published her first book of poetry. Then PressPress published Delivery which gives a taste of the lively, I'll-pull-no-punches style which makes you want to hear her perform. She has recently appeared at the ACT Spring Poetry Festival, Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, the Shoalhaven Poetry Festival, Wordstorm (the NT Writers’ Festival), the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Jakarta Literary Biennale, and the Singapore Writers’ Festival.
From Extinctions -
Extinction
An obsession with the sea steers his poems
but he’s no lovelorn sailor,
no spilt seaman – he’s a whale,
a thunderclap of tail on water,
a rising force beneath my boat.
He’ll pull me down
but I’ll savour each one of those 40,000 leagues
beneath with my Moby Dick;
I’ll just smile when I’m beached.
As he leaves for another migration,
he crushes me to him,
tightening our fate
like a whalebone corset.
From Delivery -
Alms
It's Holy Thursday, George.
In another millennium,
Jesus is washing the feet of his disciples.
He is about to lay down his life for -
no, not his friends - his enemies.
This is what I'd like you to do:
lay down your arms
for Ali Ismael Abbas; peel
the skin from your flesh
and wrap his pupal form; drain
your blood into a cup
and hold it to his lips; break
your body into several pieces that they may
be father, mother, grandmother, brothers
and sisters to him.
We are two thieves, you and I,
but he has done nothing wrong
