Border Crossing

Caitlin Maling’s second volume, Border Crossing, continues to showcase the development of an exciting new voice in Australian poetry. Now Maling’s poems shift from the first volume’s gritty treatment of childhood and adolescence growing up in WA, to a consideration of what it is to be an Australian in America, where the conflicting voices and identities of home and abroad jostle against and seek their definitions from each other. In this volume, as in the first, her emphasis on place – geography and environment – is as strong as ever.

Caitlin Maling grew up in Western Australia, mainly in the suburbs around Fremantle. She moved to Melbourne to complete her BA in 2007, then to Cambridge to complete a Masters of Philosophy in Criminological Research. She returned to Perth and then left for Houston to complete an MFA in poetry, for which she received the WA Department of Culture and the Arts International Scholarship. Caitlin Maling’s first volume of poetry, Conversations I’ve Never Had, won the Newcastle Poetry Prize under 35s (2014) and was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2014). Poems from Conversations I’ve Never Had were reproduced in Best Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Westerly, Green Mountains Review, Threepenny, Australian Poetry and Meanjin, among others.