AMANDA ANASTASI

"Our consumer culture requires us to be fast-paced, overworked, distracted and thinking as little as possible about what we consume and how it affects the environment. What poetry requires of us is the opposite of this. It calls for deep reflection and a slowing down." - Amanda Anastasi

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"A climate change advocate and poet, Amanda Anastasi is based in Melbourne. Amanda is the Poet in Residence at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, where she currently assists with research, education, and awareness on the global environmental crisis." - Sukhveer Kaur

"Write the poem that it scares you to write." - Amanda Anastasi

"Don't underestimate your reader and their ability to be challenged and confronted." - Amanda Anastasi

"The Inheritors is a book in which Anastasi's political and aesthetic impulses work powerfully together to create mandatory reading whatever your preferred literary genre may happen to be" - Geoff Page

"Anastasi offers a deep understanding of what societal change requires on an individual level. That is what makes this collection so compelling." - Gemma White

"To someone who lives a couple of meters above sea level on a sand island, this resonates uncomfortably: an especially disturbing observation." - Martin Duwell

"Acknowledging our reality with courage is an important step to achieving the kind of action that is required" - Amanda Anastasi

"Last year, Monash University’s Climate Change Communications Research Hub appointed Amanda Anastasi as their Poet in Residence. The Saturday Paper chose its own poet laureate, Maxine Beneba Clarke, and published a poem of hers every week." - Andy Jackson

"I felt that the poems need to - whatever the specific subjects chosen - look the uncomfortable truth in the eye." - Amanda Anastasi

"In a sort of unacknowledged legislators of the world program David Holmes, Director of the Monash University Climate Change Communication Research Hub, writes in an annual update on its activities that: 'we are very pleased to launch the work of Amanda Anastasi who has been commissioned by the Hub to write poetry that brings in the science, the politics and the impacts of climate change.' " - Noel Turnbull

"When seemingly necessary parts of our lives are no longer present, room is created for a new kind of reflection." - Amanda Anastasi

"A poet needs all their experience, all their senses, all their attention and all the silences to give us this insight. Amanda Anastasi makes this look and sound effortless." - Angela Gardner

"The Audenesque opening of Anastasi’s ‘The Prodigal Ones’ highlights her confidence in constructing near perfect lines and the setting up of unexpected rhythms." - Mark Roberts

"A confident and very promising debut." - Ali Alizadeh