In her first full-length collection, prize-winning poet Fiona Hile applies the ambitions and strategies of fiction to produce genuinely novel poems that signal ‘a state of poetic emergency’.

Novelties resonates with the themes of nature, love, and literature while showcasing Hile’s command of style and form. The traditional Australian ballad is thwarted through playful, hyperbolic language to provide a counterfeit narrative of Australian poetry while the history of love is seized and re-written, with desire placed on consignment to a leased-out libido.

Elements of the traditional Australian aesthetic are conscripted to appear in an impossible evocation in which ‘all novels are short stories, all stories are really poems’, and an easel is a guillotine for writing poems about nature.