Book Launch

Come celebrate the launch/arrival/release of In Hand, Amanda Joy's book of poetry. 7:30pm, December 17th at The Fringe Gallery, 94 Bawdan street, Willagee.



To be launched by Dr Andrew Burke, with readings from ze book by the dapper & strange, Black Rider himself, Jeremy Balius and the sky snapping, word mistress of Recoil, Coral Carter and music by the wildly delicious Kissin' Cousins! Bring your dancing slippers... and a poem to share!


Some blurbs ..s.... s

Amanda Joy's In Hand is a sustained love letter, a farewell signature in a handwritten flourish. It is a celebration of the body, of loss and acceptance, family, water and landscape. These poems work their spells in language cast under pressure into a sublime, lyrical whole. ~Anthony Lawrence


The poetry of Amanda Joy stretches out to touch the reader both physically and spiritually. Her words penetrate to the heart and soul of relationships, opening to the naked eye not only those we have with lovers, friends and strangers, but that which we have with the natural world that surrounds us. Then deeper still, to the relationship between our own thoughts, needs and desires.
In Hand has a devotional quality. Each poem an experience, to be carried with us and contemplated throughout the day; each poem a flower of mystery, whose petals await their revelatory blossoming.
~Ray Sapienza, Moongaze Publishing, editor of Fragile Arts Press, author of Tumbled Streams


‘In Hand’, by Australian writer Amanda Joy, offers much in a diverse selection of poems. These are poems of love, desire, longing and language as experienced in these and other states. The common trope these days of the body as language is nevertheless used in many vivid and quite extraordinary poems.
Any reader who engages with Joy's poems will find many such subtle constructions, courage to confront the real, or the mysterious, and the general adventure of life and language. Knowledge and sometimes some ‘difficulty’ in this writing, thus enhances a life lived - but a life revealed in subtle ideas, and vivid images and sharp details, and as language, lived intensely. ~Richard Taylor, Conversations With a Stone


Amanda Joy's writing conveys perfect fragility as she tells of a world where beauty is temporary and to be held reverently for the moment it exists
~ Victoria Fotios, Sunday Morning Spiders