Disorders of the Blood

With candour and grace, Leah Kaminsky focuses her physician’s gaze with scalpel-like precision, as she probes the secrets of the body’s terrain. Exploring the vulnerability of the human condition, she examines our fragile lives as we confront our own mortality – the weakness and the strength that emerge from the tumult of illness and decline, trauma and war. Kaminsky lowers her doctor’s mask, using a deft poetic lens as she straddles the realms of science and the soul, shining light on the malady of illness. By checking her own emotional temperature, she foregrounds torment as well as resilience, creating a powerful and graceful elegy to both the living and the dead.

‘Leah Kaminsky’s poems here are visceral, incisive and stirring with sinewy threads of rawness and spirit. Disorders of the Blood delivers both elegiac and emotive fierceness, a poetic delight.’—ALICIA SOMETIMES

‘Kaminsky’s poems find the jarring fragments – the bruising moments, the vulnerabilities laid bare – which follow a doctor from surgery to oncology ward to home… echoing memories and family legacies… Kaminsky’s wider compassionate concerns, dreamlike and haunting, shine through.’CATE KENNEDY

Doll’s Eye

Shifting in time and place, Doll’s Eye weaves an intriguing story of love, loss and survival against a backdrop of war and displacement. Evocative and compelling, it brings into question the gap between what we see, and what we don’t.

Kaminsky’s best book yet. A moving quixotic adventure, steeped in ancient traditions and trembling with the darkest storms of history.BRAM PRESSER

With her trademark compassion and heart, Kaminsky brings this story of adventure, exile and betrayal to vivid lifeTONI JORDAN

A fierce book, intense with craft. This doctor-poet can really stitch words together: tight, unadorned and razor sharp tailored to fit brilliantly. TOM KENEALLY

An absorbing and richly imagined novel of love, hope and resilience through dark, almost mythical times. Vivid, haunting, unforgettable. LUCY TRELOAR

Stitching Things Together

A fierce book, intense with craft. This doctor-poet can really stitch words together: tight, unadorned and razor sharp tailored to fit brilliantly.Dr Robyn Rowland, Australian Poetry Centre

This is fluent, well crafted poetry but it is not always comfortable as Leah Kaminsky takes us on a journey with her father fleeing from Poland to escape the holocaust, then as a doctor struggling to keep her commitment to her patients, and finally to Haifa, raising children under constant danger from rockets and suicide bombers.

Animals Make Us Human

A fundraiser for our wildlife, from land, sea and sky. Proceeds go to the Australian Marine Conservation Society and Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

Animals Make Us Human is a response to the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires. This stunning collection features many of Australia’s finest writers and photographers (full disclosure: I am in it). Essays of hope and love for nature, this is the perfect Christmas gift. Proceeds will help wildlife conservation.

FAVEL PARRETT, THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, BOOKS OF THE YEAR

We’re all going to die

A joyful book about the necessity of celebrating life in the face of death.

‘A beautiful, brave, inspiring work. Required reading for anyone who plans to die.’ – Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE is an engaging, compassionate and compelling book about death – or more specifically, about how, by facing and accepting our coming death, we can all learn to live in a more vital, fearless and truthful way.

The Hollow Bones

The Hollow Bones implores us to pay careful attention to the crucial lessons we might learn from our not-too-distant history.

I’ve just read, with great pleasure, The Hollow Bones. What a triumph! It’s a truly wonderful evocation of a hard to comprehend time.

TIM FLANNERY

From the embers of history, Kaminsky weaves a cracking tale of adventure, competing loyalties and the folly of sacrificing reason on the ideological altar.

BRAM PRESSER