Brian Purcell, editor of 100 Poets, speaking at the launch at The Shop Gallery, Glebe.
100 Poets, edited by Brian Purcell, Flying Islands Pocket Poets 2025 was launched at the Poets Picnic in Markwell on December 8 2024 and at The Shop Gallery, Glebe, NSW on 26 January 2025 by Magdalena Ball .
Publishing 100 books in 14 years is no small thing. To do it as a not-for-profit, local, community-run (or even one man run as Flying Islands has been for most of that that time) venture with some of the most exciting poets in Australia and around the world, in multi-lingual, sometimes coloured or pictoral, and always affordable formats while maintaining a not-for-profit, art-centric, collaborative focus is just phenomenal.
As many of you will be aware, Flying Islands was started right here at Markwell in 2010 by the current President Kit Kelen, in association with ASM in Macao China. Kit has continued to drive the press, ensuring that the high quality, low-pomposity (“minor works”, “pocket books”) ethos is a key part of every publication. The affordability and non-commerciality (we are a not for profit) remain non-negotiable.
It was Brian Purcell who suggested we might celebrate our 100th book with an anthology of 100 authors. To reward Brian for his great idea, he got the massive and thankless task of editor. The resulting anthology is a treasure and a testament to both Brian’s tenacity in herding the many Flying Island cats—some, whose works stretch right back to the early days of 2010 and some slotted for future publication, gathering, collating, nagging, proofreading, and finally presenting the fine collection here, a fair bit chonkier than our usual pocket books.
The names here read like a who’s who in the poetry zoo. These are names even non-poets know, alongside more emergent poets from Australia and overseas and even a few translations. I won’t give you a list of famous names or the many poets in this collection that I’m already a fan of but I’m certain you will find some names here that give you a little fangirl thrill. Just to take one example, following is a tiny couplet from Jill Jones’ ‘In All This Queer Apparel’
Time is just a detour
Pleasure without the arms of guilt
This book represents most, if not all of the poets who have been published with the press over its long tenure and is a great way to immerse in the variety of styles across a spectrum of poets, old and young, performative and surreal, experimental, lyrical, classical, and translated. This is a book to enjoy slowly – maybe a poem a day. I’ve been waking with one poem before getting out of bed and I find it is a gorgeous way to begin the day with language, as a way to stimulate your own work or to simply engage yourself in this extraordinary community of parties -let’s call it COP100 – the more impactful COP: a cabal, a collective, a force for connection. The work in these pages forms its own conversation, linked, through serendipity – by the first letter of the work, so that the poems near one another form their own conversation.
The book is dedicated to five Flying Island poets who are no longer alive but who have left a deep mark on Flying Island: Gail Hennessy, Andrew Burke, Rob Schackne, Jill McKeowen and Iman Budhi Santosa. There are poems from each of them (two from Andrew) in the book, and since she’s not here to read her own, I will indulge myself by reading one poem from my old friend Gail Hennessy, who I once double launched a book with in the open air on Hunter Street Mall, each of us reading the other’s work.
Summer Holidays
when we met
you were wearing
your corduroy jacket
velvet, with a lining of silk
the smell it borrowed from youwe would send
the kids to the shop
to buy ice-creams
so we could make love
in the holiday shack
near Candlagan Creek
where mangrove roots
tethered the wooden boat
trapped its reflection
in tea-stained water
Reading 100 Poets has made me feel less isolated and through the sheer joy of such immersion, less like I’m living in a growing dystopia and more like I’m part of a real transformation. Such is the power of making nothing happen. That is, making nothing happen. Congratulations to everyone who has been a part of it. 100 poets is 100 kinds of joy, and I am delighted to launch it into the world.
– Magdalena Ball
Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer, interviewer, and managing editor of Compulsive Reader. Her stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and interviews have appeared in a wide number of journals and anthologies, and have won local and international awards. She is the author of several novels and poetry books, most recently, Bobish, a verse-memoir published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2023. Find out more at her website: http://www. magdalenaball. com
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100 Poets, edited by Brian Purcell, is available from https://flyingislands pocketpoets. com.au/product/ 100-poets/
Rochford Street Review 