Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho

Off-kilter, Stephanie Conn’s third collection, sees the environment and the body under pressure; the landscape burns, the body sickens, relationships fracture. Threat looms large in the collection, yet these poems also chart a tentative path through the darkness – animals adapt to hostile conditions, the body rests and art is created out of the lived experience of chronic illness. The reader travels across the globe from Tasmania, in the blistering heat, to Canada and its frozen winter, by way of the Amazon Rainforest and Frida Kahlo’s Mexico. These are poems of people and place, crisis and pain, but also of hope.