Shelf Life
POEMS
Hemat Malak
Publication date
ISBN:
July
2026
978-1-923248-27-4
About the author
HEMAT MALAK lives and writes in Picton, NSW. Born in Egypt, she migrated to Australia with her family in 1969 at the age of three. She works as an accountant in the not-for-profit sector. Following early recognition for her spiritual writing, which received finalist placements in international awards, she returned to poetry after decades away from the form she first loved in childhood.
In 2025, Hemat won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize and received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. That year, she was also shortlisted for the ACU Prize for Poetry and the Robert Gray Prize, longlisted for the Liquid Amber and Ros Spencer Poetry Prizes, and won the adult category of the Fisher’s Ghost Writing Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in Australian and international journals and anthologies, including Rattle, Rochford Street Review, Catchment Literary Journal, Locative Magazine, and publications from 5 Islands Press, One Art, WestWords, and WA Poets.
Shelf Life is her debut poetry collection
About the book
The title poem to Hemat's Malak's debut collection, the poet wonders "what to make today from these empty shelves". It is hard to believe that there could be a more complete answer to that question than the book itself. There is a great deal of discarding in Shelf Life, both literal and metaphorical: of conventions and constraints, of pieties and platitudes, of relationships that drain rather than sustain, and of the accumulated baggage from them. But, like those of the good gardener she refuses to be, Malak's choices are judicious. She knows what to cut away and what to leave. The cleared space allows a clearer vision, and the pruning provides the conditions for new growth. The result is this rich collection of always wise, and sometimes whimsical poems that "balances warmth, humour, and emotional acuity with remarkable craft." (Paris Rosemont)
Hemat Malak’s Shelf Life is an extraordinary debut— deeply human, sharply observed, and quietly radiant. Rich with reflections on parenthood, divorce, love, and reinvention, alongside delightfully quirky pieces such as “Why One-Planet-Universes Smell Like Pee,”this is a collection that balances warmth, humour, and emotional acuity with remarkable craft". In “Fish Shop at the Boat Shed in a Bathtub,” Malak writes: "We never did go back after the children—too hard to sail with baggage." By the collection’s second section, Marriage, it becomes clear that the baggage weighing her down will eventually be cast aside. It is a privilege to accompany this astonishing poet through Shelf Life as she charts new horizons.
—PARIS ROSEMONT
Shelf Life is the unfurling and emergence of unflinching, essential, compassionate humanity. A collection that distils the beautiful, terrible, tension of life, and its light, painful, joyous release.
—MICHAEL CAMPBEL
Shelf Life is a heaving confession of love, motherhood, broken marriage and exhaustion that channels the best of Sharon Olds while praying for an intervention by Marie Kondo. Searingly honest and deeply human, these poems lay down their load at the altar of a life spent trying to make everyone’s fucking view better. They are damp hugs stuffed in pockets for later; they are pieces of cheese from the deli counter that might just change your life; they are iridescent with hope, acceptance and a wisdom that will continue to quench the forest floor of your lungs long after you have read them.
—ALI WHITELOCK