Kate Lilley, Tilt
Winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (2019)
Tilt follows the skewed itinerary of attachment and loss, possession and dispossession; the movement of people and things, from Greta Garbo’s Manhattan exile to the Green Bans of 1970s Sydney to the precarious passages of deracinated subjects. In its detours through the copia of material history, lived experience and the archive of poetic forms, the book itself becomes a teeming repository of the real.
Kate Lilley has published two books of poetry, Versary (Salt 2002, winner of the Grace Levin Prize) and Ladylike (UWAP 2012), two Vagabond chapbooks, Round Vienna and Realia, and is the editor of Margaret Cavendish: Blazing World and other writings (Penguin Classics) and Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (UWAP). She is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Sydney where she directs the Creative Writing program. Kate is a widely published scholar of queer, feminist textual history and theory from 17th century women’s writing to contemporary poetry and poetics. She is also the poetry editor of Southerly. Follow her work at https://sydney.academia.edu/KateLilley.
Tilt is Kate Lilley’s third full-length collection. Both of her previous books were shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize and received multiple citations in the Book of the Year lists in the Sydney Morning Herald/Age and Australian Book Review. Her edition of Dorothy Hewett’s Selected Poems was shortlisted in the WA Premier’s Awards and also cited as a Book of the Year in the SMH/Age. Major invited readings include the University of Chicago, Indiana University, the Holloway Reading at the University of California at Berkeley, the Fannie Hurst Reading at Brandeis University, Cambridge University Poetry Festival, Adelaide Festival Writers Week, Perth Festival and Sydney Writers Festival. She publishes poetry regularly in major national and international journals.
'Australian poetry won't be the same after Ladylike', Stuart Cooke, Australian Poetry
'Intelligent, graceful, sceptical, endlessly resonant, Lilley’s poetry gives us a passionately exact language, which opens up the complexities of the inexact; in particular, the complexities of desire and love.' Alison Croggan, Overland
'Unlike her earlier book, the superb Versary, Ladylike uses no traditional verse forms. But Lilley's poems are always concise with wit and meaning, and the same bold, singed humour remains with endless thought clutching each taut line...With its sophisticated observations and gleaming learning and design, Ladylike is a searingly intelligent book that rewards many readings.' Gig Ryan, Sydney Morning Herald
'Kate Lilley’s poems...display a refinement of camp definable as the application of precise moral and aesthetic discrimination to and through the products of commercial culture, in a way Augustan in its severity and precision….brilliant.'
John Wilkinson, Jacket
'There's a langorous resourcefulness to these poems - as if their parts could just fall apart, but they don't.' Michael Farrell, Jacket2
'The poems are exquisite and compelling.' Pam Brown, Southerly
'Compulsively readable', John Tranter [blurb endorsement of Versary]
Kate Lilley, Tilt
2018. 148mm x 210mm. 90pp.
ISBN 978-1-922181-87-9
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
