Gawimarra

"'Salvo and salve, these bracing poems return to ""this ground of unfinished business"", animated by remarkable resilience, care and love. Gawimarra extends a generous invitation to the reader; these poems will leave you changed.' - Sarah Holland-Batt 'Like a river that forks and returns into itself like a braid, Gawimarra emerges, submerges and re-emerges: black sisterhood, motherhood and womanhood; the loss and learning of language; and love for Aboriginal places and people.' - Mykaela Saunders 'This is highly nuanced activist poetry that speaks from the very core of Country with compassion, understanding, community and inviolable spirit.' - John Kinsella 'Jeanine Leane's voice soars in this unbound collection of poetry. She simultaneously tells it like it is and creates connection over those things that work to divide us. Evocative in its style, infuriating in its telling of colonial realities, and so, so warm and inviting, Gawimarra Gathering calls us into Circle with these beautiful Aunties, and we are honoured by their glorious stories. As Jeanine says, ""what is woven will never unravel"".' - Katherena Vermette 'The poems in Gawimarra dare speak the unspeakable, a subverted elegy in which the subject Country exists with urgency and vitality. Poet Jeanine Leane uses the act of gathering to both structure this collection and destabilise the status quo, the implications of which sever us from our world and tether us to that of the poems and all that they promise. Gawimarra is an awakening, a shaking to the core - and I am still shaking, long after I have put it down.' - Sara Saleh"