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Perth Poetry Club this Saturday 16th May 2026, 2pm-4pm, has wonderful poet
Coral Carter & launch of her latest collection Good Grief + Open-mike
launch by Liana Joy Christensen, with reply and readings by Coral Carter
at The Moon Café, 323 William Street Northbridge and on ZOOM.
Coral Carter was born in Kalgoorlie but now lives in Bayswater Western Australia. She reads weekly at the Perth Poetry Club. Has published two collections Descended from Thieves Mulla Mulla Press 2012 and Backyard Listening Mulla Mulla Press 2019 Coral was shortlisted in the Newcastle poetry prize 2022 and won the Looking Forward/Looking Back poetry prize 2023. She was long listed for The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2024 and won the Grieve 2025 Robert Miller Memorial Award.
Liana Joy Christensen says
“Coral Carter possesses a rare talent for writing about ordinary lives with extraordinary precision. Her images and language are unmistakeably Australian, evoked with the poet’s signature style of humorous honesty. There is nothing of bush-ballad cliché here, yet people who never normally read poetry would recognise themselves in these pages. The poems are salt and vinegar: crisp, sharp, satisfying. There is nothing sentimental in their clear-eyed accounting, yet the work is shot through with surpassing tenderness. The collection is well named. The poems refract the paradox of grief in all its manifestations, including the ironic Aussie saying “good grief”. It takes time to discern what is good about grief, just as it takes time to tune in to the spare beauty of desert country. Immerse yourself in these poems and you will learn to do both.”
Good Grief is “a book of presences brought into close focus by absences, missed chances, and the pathos of the unchangeable. Carter’s deft use of image and formal structure brings the worlds of the departed into a kind of immediacy that rolls over a reader like a passing storm. This is a poetry of family and loss that is deeply human, and which will touch the most human of hearts.” Alan Fyfe
Join us to celebrate poetry with
Launch of Coral Carter’s Good Grief + open-mike
Launcher is Liana Joy Christensen, with reply and readings by Coral Carter
2pm-4pm this Saturday 16th May 2026
at The Moon Café, 323 William Street, Northbridge & on Zoom
Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84254037443
The backroom of The Moon is properly air-conditioned, and it is a great space to be wherever you are on a Saturday afternoon 2pm-4pm WST, because in weeks to come, we have:
16-May-26
Coral Carter Book Launch, “Good Grief” + open-mike
Launch speech by Liana Joy Christensen
Reply and readings by Coral Carter
23-May-26
Kate Barrett-Lennard + open-mike
30-May-26
Maggie Van Putten & Kavyamani (UK) + open-mike
… All with open mike, not to be missed …