Stephanie Powell, Gentle Creatures

Powell’s new poetry collection is a study of a fantasist, stuck between the everyday and imagined worlds, between small moments and monstrous cities. Gentle Creatures puts a new shine on the domestic. This is a different way of looking at the world. It is a book of intersections. The past speaks to a possible future, married people speak wordlessly in airconditioned rooms, a fat girl is becoming furniture. Cities are turning into trees and weeds, there are dreams of going to Chinatown with old lovers. There are suburbs, freeways, country towns with wide crossroads. There is danger and joy. In Gentle Creatures, Powell reveals the private and unspoken in the hope of finding a common experience with the reader. It is a deep dive into the part of her brain where the gentle creatures live. She is in search of the second skin of the everyday, making her way through sex, the body, girlhood, nature, family and new marriage. Written just after returning home to Melbourne after a decade overseas, these poems also represent the longing and uncertainty of displacement, the feeling in your bones when you know it is time to come home. The newness and trepidation of when you finally get there. Told in two movements, Gentle Creatures and Birthday Dresses, this is a collection of textures and tastes, creating a world where the mundane glitters and the past aches from the room next door.

‘There is something coolly assured about her voice. Her poems swiftly captivate the reader. Stephanie’s writing is sublimely original and surprising.’ Rebecca Goss

‘Powell's poetic master stroke is in the way she elevates her subject matter, not through over romanticisation, but through creating an understated luminosity.’ Daniel Harlow

Stephanie Powell writes and takes photos. Her collection Bone was published by Halas Press in 2021. She is the recipient of the Melbourne Poets Union Poetry Prize, 2022. Now Melbourne based, she lived for several years in London, with stints in Canada and Kenya. Her poetry has been published in highly regarded UK and Australian journals including Ambit Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, The Moth, Bad Lilies, Wild Court, The Rialto and Ink Sweat and Tears. One of her poems will also be published in the forthcoming ‘Resilience’ anthology from Mascara Literary Review (via Ultimo Press).  She has been longlisted for the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year competition (2021), the inaugural AUB Poetry Prize (2021), the Leeds Poetry Prize (2022) and the Lucent Dreaming Poetry Prize, 2022. Her writing was featured as part of Message in the bottle (2021), a cross-disciplinary exhibition in response to Covid-19 lockdowns at the Old Operating Theatre in London.

Stephanie Powell, Gentle Creatures
2023. 148mm x 210mm. 112pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-57-4
Release: February 2023

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.