Kate Middleton, MA English '09 – short-listed for the Age Book of the Year Awards in Australia

KATE Middleton’s first book shows much variety – from the confident terza rima of the Minotaur poems, to the fragmentary discursions inspired by artists and movie stars – with a quirkily defiant undercurrent of identity moulded, strangely, by absence, like a photo negative. Middleton’s poems often seem to mimic their subject matter, shattering a word into pieces, or ending elliptically. Many of the poems reimagining movie stars show a keen, crisp humour, as in Lana Turner “proving her fitness/ for melodrama, life leading effortlessly to court”.