Books@Stones event: Gardening on Mars by Jane Frank

Join us at Books@Stones on Tuesday 11 November for a special event with Jane Frank to celebrate the release of her latest poetry collection, Gardening on Mars. Jane will be in-conversation with Svetlana Sterlin.

Jane Frank’s third collection of poems transcends terrestrial boundaries, exploring profound connections between the natural world and human experience. Ranging from confessional and ekphrastic poems to surreal evocations of Australian place that express strong emotional connection, these poems maintain a rich dialogue with visual artists and writers of the past and present. Whether she is writing about hang gliding with Leonardo da Vinci, being lost inside a rainforest snow globe or witnessing a pinball game between galaxies, this is tactile and visual writing that bristles with striking language. Moving through her poems is like walking through a forest of imagery, layered and verdant, and is also an expedition through the fabled landscape of imagination and memory where love, longing and loss are familiar compass points. Her poems are often meditations on the joineries of life, the spaces where is meets was and might have been. The introspective is illuminating but there is also an understanding of the ways in which the poet seeks to garden her own life in the face of personal and planetary challenges. The poet is accessible, empathetic and yet displays masterful form and craft. She makes us want to go with her, share the journey, wherever it ends.

Jane Frank is a prize-winning Australian poet, editor and academic. Her previous poetry collections Ghosts Struggle to Swim (2023) and Wide River (2020) were published by Calanthe Press and her work is widely published in journals and anthologies in Australia and internationally. Her monograph Regenerating Regional Culture: A Study of the International Book Town Movement (2018) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Sociology of the Arts series. She is Reviews Editor at StylusLit literary journal and lectures in the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Born in New Zealand to Russian/Jewish parents, Svetlana Sterlin writes poetry, prose, and screenplays. The recipient of the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award, If Movement Was a Language is her first full-length collection. In 2023, her fiction was recognised in the Richell Prize and State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award. She has poetry and fiction in Westerly, Island, takahē, Meanjin, Cordite, the Australian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere.

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All our events are free to attend, but bookings are required as seats are limited.