Anne Casey
Paperback 2021
In this lyrical, often wry, sometimes heartbreaking and just occasionally horrifying selection of poems, internationally award-winning poet, Anne Casey invites you to step into her shoes, take a self-guided cruise through the State of Womanhood with its redacted facts and multiple travel warnings, feel the red hot sting of betrayal, and leave behind nights of secrets and dread to rise with the rage that her fine sisters gave, a scattering of blue skies and a pocketful of hope on the long walk home.
Booklink: https://recentworkpress.com/product/portrait-of-a-woman-walking-home/
Responses to Portrait of a Woman Walking Home:
Magnificent! Every living, breathing woman will find a piece of themselves in Anne Casey’s poetry.
—Patricia A. Florio, Founding Publisher, American Writers Review
Portrait of a Woman Walking Home is an extended contemplation of life in the body of a woman. Casey’s intricate, loaded poems celebrate some aspects of this life – and perform a forensic appraisal of the rest. The voice is sometimes wry, sometimes angry, sometimes elegiac, and always deeply engaged with the language-work and heart-work central to the poet’s vocation. Casey also explores connections between women – mothers, daughters, intuited ghosts, known and documented victims. An unflinching and hard-won book.
—Melinda Smith, Winner Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry
Now, more than ever, we need this exquisite pocket book of poetry, to carry around with us, in our handbags and in our hearts. A hymn to beauty, to the inner life of women and to the strangely redemptive act of arranging words on the page in such a way that the idea of faith is no longer an idea – a mere noun – but a living and felt presence.
—Gabrielle Carey, Winner Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction
Casey’s powerful words speak to and for all of us: We have the ability to really look at ourselves from multiple points of view and though what we catch sight of is not always pleasant it enables us to understand what we need to understand.
—MTC Cronin, Winner Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry
In Portrait Of A Woman Walking Home Anne Casey powerfully articulates a poetic politics of female autonomy. Her poems artfully probe the historical, social and political construction of ‘womanhood’ as it intersects with the ‘complicated’ subterranean territory of female self-image, rousing us to join in her bold creative expression of female agency: ‘I am the cry and the call of the brave. I rise, I rise, I rise’.
—Saba Vasefi, Poet, Publisher, Human Rights Journalist and Academic
This is a deeply political book, a feminist anthem, but not exclusionary. Casey’s walk home will be read and re-read to understand the state of woman in our time, from where she set off, and where she is going.
—Indran Amirthanayagam, Editor Beltway Poetry Quarterly
About the author
Anne Casey is an award-winning Sydney-based Irish poet/writer and author of four critically acclaimed collections: Portrait of a Woman Walking Home (Recent Work Press 2021); the light we cannot see (Salmon Poetry 2021), out of emptied cups (Salmon Poetry 2019) – which was selected for Best Dressed 2020 (Sundress Academy for the Arts, USA) and Books of the Year 2019 (The Lonely Crowd, UK) – and where the lost things go (Salmon Poetry 2017). Anne has won poetry prizes in Ireland, the UK, USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, most recently American Writers Review 2021 and iWoman Global Award 2021 in the field of literature. She has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
A journalist, magazine editor, legal author and media communications director for 30 years, her work ranks in leading national daily newspaper, The Irish Times’ Most Read, and is widely published and anthologised internationally – The Irish Poetry Reading Archive (James Joyce Library, University College Dublin), The Irish Times, The Canberra Times, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Atlanta Review, American Writers Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Australian Poetry Anthology, Griffith Review, Westerly Magazine and Cordite Poetry Review among many others. She has served on numerous editorial advisory boards. Anne holds an honours Law Degree from University College Dublin and was awarded First Place in her graduating class in Media Communications from the Technological University Dublin. She is the recipient of an Australian Government Scholarship for her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney.
Website: http://anne-casey.com/. Social media: @1annecasey.