home Contact details PO Box 443, St Kilda, VIC 3182 Booksellers and libraries please place your orders with our distributor Inbooks: p. (02) 9986 7082 Please click here for a booklist of available titles. For print-friendly samples of poetry from each book, click here. RECENT REVIEWS
COMING SOON Peter Steele: Braiding the Voices: Essays in Poetry ISBN: 978-0-9808523-4-9
JUST PUBLISHED Young Poets: An Australian Anothology ISBN: 978-0-9808523-3-2 Dan Disney: And then when the ISBN: 978-0-9808523-2-5
Elizabeth Campbell: Error ISBN:978-09808523-1-8 ISBN:978-09808523-0-1
ISBN: 978-09805269-7-4
ISBN: 978-09805269-9-8
ISBN: 978-09805269-8-1
We are home to some of Australia’s finest new and established poets. 21 titles have appeared since 2006 to widespread, favourable reviews. 3 (by Albiston, Holt and Steele) have won national prizes, from 9 shortlistings. The books are beautiful to look at and to open. Our books radically vary in styles but all beguile into reading at a speaking pace, and returning. We publish only what we believe to be of outstanding quality, for any shelf that has poetry. The poets (thus far) Petra White, Elizabeth Campbell and LK Holt, have a reputation as among the front-rank of a new generation. Claire Gaskin, Paul Magee, Morgan Yasbincek and David Musgrave, into their forties, but fresh in the scene, are receiving very strong notice. Longer-established poets, Julian Croft, Jordie Albiston, John Jenkins, Catherine Bateson and Mark O’Connor, have produced distinguished and acclaimed volumes with us. And there are definitive selected or collected volumes from Aileen Kelly, Peter Steele, Marcella Polain, Jan Owen and Vincent Buckley. For bios, photos, descriptions and reviews, click on catalogue. Jacinta Le Plastrier is the publisher. Conor Hutchison is the associate publisher. John Leonard, commissioning editor, taught at Monash and James Cook universities, and is the well-known anthologist of Seven Centuries of Poetry in English (OUP). He has edited 4 landmark Australian anthologies, including the recent full survey The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, 2009. Several John Leonards inhabit the literary globe. Note that ours is not a poet, and has no other website.
Submissions for publication
A request Some good bookshops that stock our books are listed under retail outlets. But to seek buyers is only part of our purpose. We are seeking readers, and a main resource for finding poetry books is in libraries, where our books are thus far comparatively scarce. (A set is in the Australian National Library, Vic and NSW State Libraries, and five university libraries. Elsewhere there are around 100 scattered copies in total from 21 titles.) A request to our readers: Since we don't have the resources ourselves to approach libraries effectively, anyone interested please recommend favourite titles, or supply our booklist, to your favourite librarian - and perhaps to colleagues and friends to show to theirs.
Comments on the Press Alan Wearne, Australian Literary Review, 4(1), February 2009, p.23: '... the small but eminent John Leonard Press.' From Heather Taylor Johnson, Wet Ink, 2010 One of the best things to happen to poetry in the last five years has to be the arrival of John Leonard Press. Each no frills cover laid next to the other points to the publications as part of a 'series'. From Geoff Page, The Canberra Times, July 14 2007: ‘. . . one of several handsomely produced volumes from the new John Leonard Press – the same John Leonard who, over the past few decades, has been our most thoughtful and fair-minded poetry anthologist.’ From Jen Webb, Review essay: Poetry in Australia and the John Leonard Press, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm October 2008: 'Leonard's eye hasn't deserted him. All five of the 'younger' poets (those new to book publishing) have been nominated for significant awards. This is an extraordinary and (to use the language of these various awards) highly commendable result from a year or so of publishing. It is also a remarkably generous act on the part of Leonard to put the Press together. I do not here refer to his generosity to the poets: while he does support the poets, the critical reception of these publications shows that they are all worth the candle. No, my point here is that Leonard's investment in the Press is an act of generosity directed towards readers, and towards poetry in Australia.'
Select list of longer reviews American Book Review: Jan Owen, Poems 1980-2008, reviewer Lisa Wilde, Jan/Feb 2009, p.15. Australian Book Review: Claire Gaskin, A Bud, and Paul Magee, Cube Root of Book, reviewer Gig Ryan, March 2007, p.64. Julian Croft, Ocean Island, reviewer Martin Duwell, May 2007, p.48. John Jenkins, Growing up with Mr Menzies, reviewer Geoff Page, December 2008, p.58. Australian Poetry Review: David Musgrave, Phantom Limb: http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/1009musgrave.htm September 2010. Petra White, The Incoming Tide: http://www.australianpoetryreview.com.au/0709white.htm September 2007. Blast: Poetry and Other Critical Writing: Paul Magee, Cube Root of Book, reviewer Elizabeth Campbell, No.7, 2007, p.45. Eureka Street Peter Steele, White Knight with Bee-Box: New & Selected Poems, reviewer Philip Harvey, November 2008. Poetry Ireland Aileen Kelly, The Passion Paintings: Poems 1983-2006, reviewer Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Issue 91, October 2007, p.109. Quadrant Jan Owen, Poems 1980-2008, reviewer Penelope Nelson, September 2008, p.116. Text: The Journal of Writing and Writing Courses Review of the first 8 JLP books and of the Press, reviewer Jen Webb, http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/webb.htm October 2008. For excerpts from the above, and from shorter reviews in Adelaide Review, The Age, The Australian, The Canberra Times, Cordite, Famous Reporter, Island, Radio National, Readings Monthly and Wet Ink, please see the entries under individual poets in the catalogue.
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