Upswell Publishing acquires Meera Atkinson poetry collection

Upswell Publishing has acquired world rights to the poetry collection Some Letters Take a Lifetime by Sydney-based writer Meera Atkinson.

Meera Atkinson is the author of Map of Skin (Pink Flamingo Press), a poetry chapbook; hybrid memoir Traumata (University of Queensland Press); and two academic titles, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (Bloomsbury) and Traumatic Affect (edited with Michael Richardson, Cambridge Scholars Publishing). She has published poetry, essays, hybrid nonfiction and short fiction in publications including Best Australian Poems, Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, Heat, Salon, Rabbit, Going Down Swinging, Meanjin, Southerly, Overland and Plumwood Mountain.

Atkinson said, “Some Letters Take a Lifetime is an encounter with spectres: significant others, 80s subculture, long-lost selves, departed friends and acquaintances, songs, worn patterns, mythos, elusive species in threatened ecologies, the climate crisis, and grand-scale majesty. The poems in this collection explore enigmatic interpersonal bonds, indelible imprints, and cosmic ambiguities, charting the way unresolved relationships and traumatic legacies can reverberate from some sealed place in the psyche, and the transformative process of traumatic growth. Some Letters Take a Lifetime is a meditation on examining crypted attachments and mystifying realities towards clarity, reclamation, and life-affirmation.”

Publisher Terri-ann White said, “I have followed Meera’s writing for much more than a decade and have always been drawn into the direct and electric dynamism her work offers me, whether in prose or poetry. I was taken immediately with the spirit of these poems that had me delve back and across my own life: as a citizen and a woman encountering similar settings from young adulthood to whatever came next.”

Upswell Publishing plans to publish Some Letters Take a Lifetime in July 2027.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions