Kristen Lang
Kristen Lang writes in North West Tasmania, near Sheffield. She has published Earth Dwellers (Giramondo Publishing, 2021), SkinNotes (Walleah Press, 2017) and The Weight of Light (Five Islands Press, 2017). Her earlier publication, Let me show you a ripple, includes both poetry and photography and followed in part from her PhD, awarded by Deakin University in 2004. She won the ACU Prize for Poetry in 2015, was shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award in 2019 and longlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize in the same year.
https://giramondopublishing.com/books/earth-dwellers/
Recommendations:
‘Few Australian poets have fused the mystical and the real with such skill and audacity. Laced with humour and an attention to poetry as something profoundly made, The Weight of Light is a collection to savour.’ David McCooey
‘Kristen Lang’s affinity for the natural world pulses everywhere in The Weight of Light like a drumbeat… In this impressively poised and controlled collection, Lang delves deep into questions of corporeality and ephemerality, always surfacing in clear, crystalline language.’ Sarah Holland-Batt
‘The Weight of Light asks you to listen with your bones. It refreshes you with its intelligence, care and clarity. It is both meditative, like a series of spiritual exercises, and visceral, firmly grounded in the living grass, milk, stones, streams, fire, bodies of place, of work, of journey.’ Jill Jones
‘Lyric poetry is the lightly orchestrated voice of true feeling. Its shape and its language persuade us, as readers, that soul or spirit has become fully incorporate. In Kristen Lang’s own words, again and again “we are all / this embrace”: all in her gathered moment of love or of loss. She has written of our inevitable transience, “the angels are not ourselves”, but these sure-footed poems locate personal apprehension in a physically delicate, common world. Readers will surely delight in the subtle, varied command of SkinNotes.’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe
‘Hearing these poems sing off the page is like listening to Pablo Casals play cello. Their music goes deep: resonating chest, bone, heart, nerve and brain. Afterwards you feel as if you’ve been tenderly bathed. Renewed, soothed, enlivened – freshly alert to the tender nuance and beauty of the world.’ Gina Mercer