Time: Prose poems & microfiction

Time flies over us but leaves its shadow behind. Nathaniel HawthorneIn this anthology over 40 writers measure time in inventive ways. There are microlit about toenail clippings and fish casserole to text messages that lost daylight-saving hour and some brilliant pieces on the more political associations with time such as climate change the refugee crisis and terrorism.Includes pieces from emerging Indigenous writer Raelee Lancaster along with award-winning authors Dominique Hecq Andy Jackson Mark OFlynn and finalists from The joanne burnsAward.Hand-picked by writer critic and academic Cassandra Atherton. Her most recent books of prose poetry are Trace (Finlay Lloyd 2015) and Exhumed (Grand Parade 2015).Perhaps time is the best possible theme for an anthology of micro-fiction and prose poetry; it emphasises a small aperture a modest economy the sense this form can give of something particular standing in for the greater messier and much harder-to-read larger world. Here nothing is permanent but so much is made of each particular perspective and of the raw beauty inherent in change.JULIENNE VAN LOONTime is filled with a fascinating variety of meditations on the fourth dimension. Time here is deep time ancestral time the elided time of memory the looping time of held trauma. Sometimes it fails to run at all. Mostly it refuses to last.MELINDA SMITH