Teena McCarthy’s Bush Mary is a sharp, formally playful poetry collection that moves through colonial inheritance, Catholic imagery, whiteness, girlhood, violence, weather and the Australian myth.

McCarthy is a Barkindji poet, writer, artist and academic whose work often moves across poetry, visual form, performance and Indigenous Australian histories. This collection reads as both lyric and document: Mary as saint, mother, wound, country, colonial emblem, and unstable witness. The poems have that nice small-press bite: visual, political, devotional and abrasive in the right places, with page layouts that feel less like decoration than pressure marks.

Very much one for readers interested in contemporary Australian poetry, First Nations writing, experimental page work, and religious/colonial symbolism being put through the shredder without losing its force.

Paperback, Cordite Publishing Inc., 2021. First edition, with full number line. Good second-hand condition with light shelf wear and minor handling marks to cover/pages. Published in an edition-style small press format with design by Zoë Sadokierski and text design by Kent MacCarter.