LK Holt Bundle (3 Books)

Combines LK Holt's Birth Plan (2018), Capacity (2021), and Three Books (2024).

Birth Plan is LK Holt’s fourth full-length collection is a generous, sharp-edged, technically masterful and expansive collection from one of Australia’s foremost female poets. These poems are transformative, fiercely feminist, unrelenting in their clarity, and display a rare mastery of the musicality of language. Exploring the realities of mothering and loving in the late Anthropocene, Holt’s work is rigorous in its exploration and evocation of psychological truths and half-truths. Fearless and darkly humorous, these are poems that turn on a phoneme and give full life and song to the shimmering uncertainties and hard realities of selfhood.

Capacity is a volume with two chambers. The first, 'Modern Woman Sonnets', comprises twenty-six wild and precise love poems, which can be traced back to those of the Renaissance original Louise Labé. These sonnets are versions, hardly, or echoes, clearly, of Labé’s, and perpetuate the internal logic of her love. The book’s second part, 'Demonics', contains poems of a dark and numinous music, contemplating myriad forms of possession. The lyrical, transformative structures of Holt's poems provide ‘a field of force’ for the daimonic to play, within the self and without. The darting humour and lucid astonishments of her previous work can be found here in Capacity.

'Three Books comprises "Merry War (of never meeting and never ending)", a suite of streetwise translations of 14th-century Persian poet Jahan Malek Khatun with Catullus; "Nina in the Hag Mask"; and "April", a singularly ambitious long prose poem. These are the work of a poet at the peak of her considerable technical abilities and imaginative range. If sentience is, as April, the heroine of the eponymously named poem, wonders, then perhaps we can see Three Books as the poet’s attempt to reckon with “the baffling result of simple action”. Holt transforms language into invocation, holding it by its stem.'

Judges for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry 2024 - WINNER

LK Holt has published six books; her most recent is Three Books (2024). Her books have won the Queensland Literary Award for Poetry (the Judith Wright Calanthe Award), the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Poetry (the Kenneth Slessor Prize), and the Grace Leven Prize. Her books have been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal. She lives in Narrm/Melbourne.