Incandescence by Susan Austin, Walleah Press 2025, was launched by Esther Ottaway at the Afterword Café in Fullers Bookshop, Hobart on 31 August 2025

It’s a pleasure to welcome you here to the launch of Incandescence, the luminous new poetry collection by one of Tasmania’s favourite poets and one of just ten poets longlisted in this year’s Tasmanian Literary Awards, Susan Austin.

Susan’s first book, Undertow, is one of my favourite books of the last fifteen years, and has the great honour of looking like this, all wrinkled, because it’s such a good book that I had to take it with me into the bath – and that is the mark of an amazing book, right?!

And her verse novel which lays bare the experience of infertility is another of my favourite books – so gripping, and incredibly emotionally compelling. It was my great pleasure to share the day of the launch of Dancing With Empty Prams with my own book about girls and women on the spectrum, She Doesn’t Seem Autistic.

Today we celebrate a new book, and we honour a voice – one that burns with insight, tenderness, humour, and fire. Many of you will know Susan not only as a poet, but as a mental health occupational therapist, a mother, an activist, and a generous member of our Tasmanian literary community. Her work is deeply grounded in lived experience, giving us poems rich with social observation, domestic detail, and honestly rendered experiences of motherhood, memory, grief, resilience, and hope.

In Incandescence, Susan has crafted a collection that arises from the everyday, while expanding into the universal. These themes of parenting, caregiving, surviving a pandemic, holding a marriage together, walking through grief, and making space for joy, even amid exhaustion, mean that her poems glow with warmth and insight, even when they explore moments of deep difficulty.

Susan’s poetry is also full of humour – sometimes gentle, sometimes biting. We see it in the verb-filled, joyful, exhausting poem The purposeful occupations of a two-year-old; I’ll read you the opening:

wall scribbling………………………………………………..stick poking
………….sand throwing ……………………………………………….rash cream smearing
toast tossing ……………………………………………………………………cup tipping
………….crumb swiping ……………………………………………….chewed cashew spitting

clothes snipping……………………………………………………………….bead sucking
………….backyard absconding ………….……..…………………………roadside dashing

and so on through to the end, where the child is

first story competing ……………………………………………………….lap wrestling
………….in-to-bed protesting                              …………..                middle-of-the-night calling

As well as formal poems, Susan invents her own forms, in one instance a poem in the bars of a cage, in another a Venn diagram, where she overlays the frustrations of two people in a relationship with their area of commonality, to brilliant effect. There is also portraiture of others beyond the family, fictional or near-fictional characters painted with Susan’s clear-eyed insight and deep compassion as a mental health occupational therapist. Then there is a powerful Covid sequence, bringing back the heartbreaking distancing of those years, as in Outsiders:

Mu husband returns from Flinders Island,
drops bread and milk at the door.
He stands three metres away, mask on, to talk.
My son runs to hug him.
We shout in unison –
No!

 And Susan’s deeply incisive reflections of our modern lives, as in Quality time, which I’ll read in full:

my iPhone –
………….Facebook
………….weather
………….calendar
………….emails
………….texts
………….news
my curved back
my slight frown

my two-year-old –
………….shaking her red egg-shaped maraca
………….beaming at me
………….until I notice
………….her joy

This is Susan at her best – cutting to the bone of matters, attuned to the disorientation of our contemporary lives, and capable of capturing so much emotion in a handful of lines. These moments accumulate throughout the collection: the relational, the bittersweet, the luminous. And they reflect Susan’s gift for balancing vulnerability and strength, fragility and fortitude.

Susan’s voice is important and clear – a voice you want to return to. These poems are so often about seeing – really seeing – the world, others, our children, ourselves. And they are a gift for all of us who are navigating messy, beautiful, full-to-the-brim lives.

So please join me in congratulating Susan on the release of Incandescence. She is, indeed, a bearer of light, as she engages us fully with the work of life and love. Please welcome Susan.

 – Esther Ottaway

---

Esther Ottaway is a Tasmanian/Lutruwita poet, editor and mentor who has won or been shortlisted for global prizes including the Tom Collins, Woorilla, MPU International, Mslexia, Bridport, Montreal, and Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry. Her acclaimed new collection, She Doesn’t Seem Autistic, poetically lifts the lid on bright girls with hidden autism, who are going undiagnosed and unsupported in a medical system designed for boys. In 2024, Esther co-edited a landmark anthology of disability writing, with Andy Jackson and Kerri Shying, titled Raging Grace: Australian writers speak out on disability (Puncher & Wattmann).

Incandescence by Susan Austin is available from https://walleahpress. com.au/ Susan-Austin-Incandescence.html