Jo Langdon, Delivery

‘Jo Langdon is one of Australia’s most exciting poets, known for her work’s combination of fierce clarity and imaginative freedom. This third collection is Langdon’s masterpiece.’ LISA GORTON

Delivery confronts limits and contradictions of experience and expression, tearing open language and syntax in its perceptions of birth and postpartum experience vis-à-vis the fragmented and defamiliarised body parts and radical ambiguities of Alina Szapocznikow’s tinted polyester, plaster and marble sculptures─and Szapocznikow’s biography as an artist. Curious, inventive and attentive to the allusive possibilities of language and lineation, these sharp and lively poems are simultaneously explicit and elusive, frank and understated, and always alert to sound and musicality, image and atmosphere, and the intertextual and cultural interlocutors and wider contexts of the world to which they respond. In their sustained attention to the work and life of Alina Szapocznikow, from her visceral visual artworks to the epistolary expressions of her archives and enduring significance as a figure of art and history, Langdon expands the possibilities of ekphrasis and documentary poetry in exacting and exciting new ways.

‘... sophisticated, impactful, and highly engaging through the many ways it takes up the life and art of Polish Holocaust survivor and sculptor, Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973). The poems are sometimes found, sometimes imagined, sometimes fragmentary details of a life lived against an overwhelming history, sometimes political reflections, or imaginative evocations. In addition to this there is a sharply observed and keenly felt section of poems on giving birth—a rivetingly emotional and intellectually curious suite. I have not read a collection with such sustained intensity of experiment with form and imagination from an Australian poet for many years.’ KEVIN BROPHY

Jo Langdon lives and writes on unceded Wadawurrung land. Her poetry collections are Snowline (Whitmore Press, 2012) and Glass Life (Five Islands Press, 2018). She has received fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation in Bulgaria, the National Library of Australia, and the Wheeler Centre, and her fiction was a recent runner-up in the Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. Her recent writing also appears in journals including Griffith Review, Island, Overland and Meanjin.

Jo Langdon, Delivery
Forthcoming April 2026. 148mm x 210mm. 96pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-83-3

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.