Brood Chamber
POEMS
Annie Mairéad Hunter
Publication date
ISBN:
April
2026
978-1-923248-22-9
About the author
ANNIE MAIRÉAD HUNTER no longer regrets her chequered career as a waitress, factory worker, farmhand, environmental activist, public servant, and researcher. Flung into crip time and unemploy able, Annie moved to Dja Dja Wurrung country in the Central High lands of Victoria and entered into the radical hospitality of poetry. She has won or been placed in the ACU Prize (2018 and 2025), the Liquid Amber Poetry Prize (2025), the Robert Gray Prize for Poetry (2025), and the MPU Prize (2023). Her work has been published in the journal Plumwood Mountain. Brood Chamber is her first book.
About the book
Annie Hunter’s debut collection covers an astonishing range—from musing over the fate of childhood dolls to a surreal mountain ascent with a dead father on her back, from mourning the ravages of climate change to celebrating a chance poolside encounter with an imaginative youngster, from a clear-eyed recognition of the evils of colonial dispossession to a scrupulously fair account of the lives of settler ancestors —with expansive sympathy, broad erudition and an enviable command of language and form. This book is full of poems that freely offer part of themselves but hint at layers of meaning that remain tantalisingly out of reach.
A stunning first collection. Characterised by a uniquely imaginative cast of mind, these poems are rich with a musicality that feels entirely unforced—phrases such as “glacial braille” keep on surfacing. The poems go deep into a wide range of crucial experience: motherhood and daughterhood are explored in wonderfully mythological and oceanic terms, and the natural environment is celebrated and defended and mourned in terms equally original, vivid and hard-thinking. The writing displays impressive technical skill, from highly accomplished ghazals and sonnets to larger free verse poems, with a subtle feel for the pentameter line often in evidence. We are fortunate indeed that Hunter has refused “to turn away from the savage page.”
--ROSS GILETTE
Solastalgia, elegy and lament suffuse this wide-ranging debut collection, whose language swims the tender, ambivalent matrix of maternal reckonings, the spectra of settler lineages, and the exigencies of climate catastrophe. The poems, both playful and precise, veer in mood and attitude across a range of forms; they tackle the residue and persistence of histories, and their grief struck mother lodes tend carefully to transience, erasure, silencing and loss. Hunter is not afraid to deploy literary conventions such as apostrophe to engage with other-than-human embodiments. Her poems are not for the faint-hearted: they brood, and, in their scoring of a music that brings an intimate litany alive, they do the work of brooding.
--SHARI LYNELLE