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