How to Read A City
YOUR PLACE OF LAST RESORT
Elizabeth Walton
Publication date
ISBN:
March
2026
978-1-923248-19-9
About the author
ELIZABETH WALTON is an emerging literary writer, cross-disciplinary artist and performer. She received an Anne Edgeworth Fellowship in 2023 and shortlisting in the following prizes: AAWP Emerging Writers Prize (2021), Woollahra Digital Literary Awards (2023) and Furphy Literary Prize (2024). She received second prize in the June Shenfield Poetry award in 2025 and second prize n the 2025 Robyn Mathison Poetry Award in the same year. Elizabeth was also long-listed sin the Tom Collins poetry award (2024) and highly commended in the Passionfruit Poetry Prize 2025 (UK).
Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, Reuters, ABC and The Australian. Creative works have appeared in Overland,Passionfruit Review (UK), The London Reader and Portside Review, as well
as publication in Brushstrokes: The Ros Spencer Poetry Prize Anthology (WA Poets) and Poetry d’Amour Prize Anthology (WA Poets) among other places.
How To Read A City is Elizabeth's debut collection,
About the book
This short but complex book is Elizabeth's first published collection. It is both a lament for what has been lost and a celebration of what remains; its grief, which hovers close to despair, is interfused with a powerful call to action; it is sometimes savage, sometimes whimsical. It is a clear-eyed confrontation with ecological tragedy that somehow manages to carry a message of hope.
Elizabeth Walton’s poems in How to Read a City appear as prescient shimmers of luminescence, flashes of both what remains, nd what has been irretrievably lost. As a collection, it illuminates starkly what is at stake, while the individual poems enact in delicate, sometimes irreverent movements spaces of translation, spells between the concrete science of climate reports, and the lived experience of damage unfurling. Walton’s book is a call to urgent action, but it’s also a love letter for what is still present, precious, and possible.
—DANI NETHERCLIFT
An Elizabeth Walton lyric is a finely tuned music formed and informed by a precise multidisciplinary intelligence; one attuned to the ‘contrapuntal contradictions’ at the tideline of mass extinction. How to Read a City is a book of spells, an invocation, an inter-species prayer calling us to pay attention to the "permanent
markers of our message", asking what will be—indeed, are we in—our place of last resort.
—WILLO DRUMMOND
A brilliant evocation of our times, Elizabeth Walton’s powerful narrative poem explores the chaotic unravelling of our world. It is both heart breaking and heart warming as the reader is confronted
by natural systems collapse at the same time as returning to childhood innocence and the seasons round. The brutal reality of the story is presented with ironic humour that highlights the absurdity of our self-made existential dilemma.
—DI DIBLEY