The Hazards

Spanning poems written in the United States, Central America, Europe, and Australia, The Hazards is a dazzling and inventive collection. Opening with a vision of a leveret’s agonizing death by myxomatosis and closing with a lover disappearing into dangerous waters, Holland-Batt reflects a predatory world rife with hazards, both real and imagined. Her cosmopolitan poems careen through diverse geographical territory—from haunted postcolonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua, the still Danish interiors of Hammershøi and the serial killer stalking Long Island Sound—and engage everywhere with questions of violence and loss, erasure, and extinction. Charged with Holland-Batt’s mercurial imagination and swift lyricism, this unsettling and darkly intelligent collection inhabits an uncertain world with a questioning eye and clear mind, unafraid to veer “straight into turbulence.”

Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of Aria, which won a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry, the Arts A.C.T. Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the F.A.W. Anne Elder Award, and was short-listed in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards for Poetry. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Queensland University of Technology and the poetry editor of Island. She has had international writing residencies in the U.S., Japan, and Italy.