A Brief Letter to the Sea About a Couple of Things Launch with Ali Whitelock

Dear reader, fasten your safety belt and place your tray in the upright position––this is an outrageous ride on the poetry bus that takes corners on two wheels and leaves tread marks seared into the pavement of your heart. In these days of wild struggle and uncertainty, Ali Whitelock’s bold, beautiful, tender, devastating (and weirdly), hilarious poems speak to us all. These poems howl and they ache, they hoot and they pine, they curl up with the sea urchins, sing to the starfish, waltz with the seahorses, they sleep with the moon.

‘Ali Whitelock’s poetry combines the ordinary and extraordinary, the amusing and the wounding, sometimes in a single line. It’s laugh-and-cry material, curving on a thought or image you didn’t see coming. She’s talking to you.’ Mark Mordue, Boy on Fire – The Young Nick Cave

‘While most poets write like they’re alive not to die, Ali Whitelock pleads for a poem that gives zero fucks–– then rip-writes a bonfire of them.’ Darby Hudson, Confetti Tornado

‘This is poetry with its mask off, its safety belt unfastened, its sense of humour intact. Poetry that dances where it chooses, and dares you to dance with it.’ Magi Gibson, Wild Women of a Certain Age

‘Ali Whitelock’s zesty, blazing poems witness bruised eyes and medically battered bodies, the bruised universe and bruised hopes. They vault with tenderness and fury between sea and flesh, the found and lost, the cherished and rejected. They are a tonic and joy.’ Dr Felicity Plunkett, A Kinder Sea

Ali Whitelock is a Scottish poet and writer living on the south coast of Sydney with her French chain-smoking husband. Previous poetry collections include, and my heart crumples like a coke can and the lactic acid in the calves of your despair (long-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2021). Her memoir, poking seaweed with a stick and running away from the smell was published to critical acclaim in Australia and in the UK. a brief letter to the sea about a couple of things is her third collection. www.aliwhitelock.com

Catherine Therese is an award-winning writer, designer and educator whose lifelong passion for articulating the interior lives of people and places has inspired a diverse career in Europe and Australia, where she has lived, worked and published widely across the arts. Her memoir, The Weight of Silence, was a The Age and Sydney Morning Herald Book of the Year, a Varuna Fellowship recipient and finalist in the National Biography and ABIA awards. Her novel, Things She Would Have Said Herself, is a keening portrait of a world and a woman, Leslie Bird, coming of age and to the boil, as the family she loves and loathes implodes.