Poems from the books I have published - ecopoetry, poems about love and family, poems for the anthropocene, poems for the billions-of-years history of Earth - can be found under the titles below.Best wishes, Kristen

What does the world we live in mean to us? More, when we bring it to mind, than just a platform for our daily living. Where we live is intricate, intimate, deep-time entangled and never, from the microbes of our guts to the minerals of the moon, only to do with humans. The poems of [re]turn are besotted not by the who but the inclusive where of what it is to be alive. Snout beetle, rain drop, these phone-cradling humans, the humpback whales, all of it, even AI, pours through these poems for the Earth we currently have. The world is not a stage. And perhaps, if we are lucky, there are ways to (re)turn to a being and becoming that is consciously, encompassingly, a part of it.

• Link to [re]turn at Upswell Publishing

"This poet’s work is my constant companion when travelling overseas, an uplifting reminder of our entanglement with the world even when I am caught up amid the business of our cities. I feel such an affinity with how she weaves together both the macro and micro, the vast and the intimate, the poems alive to the ties between. Through her words, yet again I find myself reconnected to what I value and treasure." Anne Morrison, Artist

"Kristen Lang rambles through the wilds of Tasmania recording bats, tracking echidnas, sampling soil, cataloguing plants, and counting the uncountable abundance of the world. These are the poems in which she stores her harvest: ravens and wombats, trilobites and tardigrades, slime moulds and whale sharks – they’re all here. But Lang is no mere naturalist. [re]turn is a field guide written by a visionary, the music of a mystic with stars in her veins and the sea in her voice. Her poems defy the fall, repair our rupture from ourselves, and promise that the boundary between us and the world has been illusory all along: “And what am I? Helmet orchid, heath dragon, / a fringe of rain, long-tailed mice and copepods, / the lattice of their waves in the coils / of the heat in me, and my warmth, too, / in their layers.” This book’s great triumph is its vindication of a world already whole, an order that accounts as much for stars as star-nosed moles. And so saturated are Lang’s lines with wild places that they leave their traces on the reader. After handling these poems, I find their pollen on my fingertips. I brush their leaves out of my hair." Michael Lavers, Poet

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The Anthropocene – what can poetry do in this epoch defined by human impact? The poems in Earth Dwellers challenge our human-centred world view, embracing perspectives which set the intimate delicacy of life forms against time scales that span millions of years. These are deep-breath poems, full of touch and awareness, consolidated by their commitment to the ecologies that envelop us. Asked where we come from, the poems speak not of nations or tribes but of mosses, mountains, oceans, birds. Asked where we are going, the poems refer not to rockets or recessions, but to the biome and our relationships within it.“These strikingly original, beautifully crafted poems reveal a profound, delicately self-effacing talent gifted with a finely tuned sensitivity. This is truly a must-read collection of fresh, haunting poems.” Peter Boyle

“This is rich, strong and vital work, full of concise, finely conceived and surprising images, its macro lens as extraordinary as its telescopic one, poem after poem here offering a deep wisdom, an engrossing meditation upon our profound interconnectedness, the world and all its history alive in Blake’s proverbial grain of sand.” David Brooks
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“Kristen Lang’s patient and precise language is a potent testament to her relationship with nature. It’s a connection both considered and felt, cerebral and embodied, at once infused with ripe wonderment and honed by deep respect.” Heather Taylor-Johnson

• Link to Earth Dwellers at Giramondo Publishing

Click the image to hear
"The roar of it".

“Few Australian poets have fused the mystical and the real with such skill and audacity. The Weight of Light is a collection to savour.” David McCooeyWe are present beside others, amid the complex sublimities of the natural world, and within the weight of our flawed yet exquisite sensitivities - the poems in The Weight of Light are a giddy exploration of the self in relation to the world and the stars beyond. Here, even the smallest sources of light carry hope; music and love, snow after fire, a heartbeat, a squirrel and the skull of a wombat receive equal adoration.“Kristen Lang’s affinity for the natural world pulses everywhere in The Weight of Light like a drumbeat.” Sarah Holland-Batt

Through poems about family, love and being human, SkinNotes digs intimately into the strengths and fragilities of our closest encounters. "Blood harmonies", "The fragile mind", "Being here" and "The heart" are the chapter titles of a collection as generous as it is inquisitive. These are tender, revealing, and probing poems.“Hearing these poems sing off the page is like listening to Pablo Casals play cello.”
Gina Mercer“Readers will surely delight in the subtle, varied command of SkinNotes.”
Chris Wallace-Crabbe

• Link to SkinNotes at Walleah Press

“Kristen Lang’s work is reflective yet humorous, immediate yet questing.” Jill Jones

“an assured and original talent.” David McCooey

Dr Willo Drummond reviews Earth Dwellers for Plumwood Mountain:
“This is profoundly ecological work […] These poems are asking us to remember the phenomenological experience of our entanglement with the beyond-human, even if we might have forgotten its texture.” Earth Dwellers “asks us to look, to consider, to reframe. It asks (no more and no less of us than) to love, and to recall, in the middle of the pulsing, feeding world, that we are not alone.”

• Link to Drummond review

Martin Duwell reviews Earth Dwellers for Australian Poetry Review:
Earth Dwellers “doesn’t play the contemporary game of blame or adopt the contemporary tone of outrage. Instead, its poems try to explore what the new sensation of the fragility of the natural world actually feels like. One of the keywords here is 'entanglement' […] I read 'Wading with Horseshoe Crabs' as a poem not content with the truisms of human evolution but an attempt to make us confront the emotional, behavioural and social consequences of it. Two poems before 'Wading with Horseshoe Crabs' is 'The Roar of It', a less expository and more visceral recreation of someone’s sense of the endless changes that surround us from the subatomic level to the human level 'Sand sucked out of rivers / into more New Yorks, more Bangkoks, more / Luandas'. In a sense the roar is the roar of entanglement in action.”

• Link to Duwell review

Daniela Brozek Cordier reviews SkinNotes for Plumwood Mountain:
"SkinNotes is a wonderful book. It might very well herald an epistemological shift into a different way of looking at humanity’s place within a vast, beyond-human world. In ways that remind me of Virginia Woolf’s writing, Lang seems to offer such an accurate portrayal of humans and the world that encloses them, that much will always remain to reward future reading and re-reading."

• Link to Cordier review

Martin Duwell reviews SkinNotes and The Weight of Light for Australian Poetry Review:
"Kristen Lang is a terrific addition to the cast of Australian poets, someone in whose poems we can feel the pressure of complex thought and who is craft-sophisticated enough to explore the best ways of making poems out of embodying these ideas."

• Link to Duwell review

Amelia Walker reviews The Weight of Light for TEXT review:
"The Weight of Light matters to our world and in it. Without ever preaching to its readers, it reminds us of all we could be doing to live more gently, more sustainably. It is a book that needs to be read and re-read. I recommend it most especially for courses in creative writing and/or literary criticism, where it could serve as an illustrative example of how contemporary poets address crucial issues of our fragile, precious world."

• Link to Walker review

Alison Clifton reviews SkinNotes for StylusLit:
"This is a poetry of the here and now, present in soul or spirit, and encased in the warm contours of a breathing body. …Kristen Lang is an urgent poetic voice singing a salutation of love, recognising her kin in the breathing and beating of the souls and hearts around her. The triumph of this collection is that it holds in its tight clutch of imagery and themes so much variance, so many truths, so much nuance. This is a fresh, dynamic poetry for the reader to return to again and again."

• Link to Clifton review

Nathanael Pree reviews SkinNotes in Cordite Poetry Review:
"One characteristic of complex and original works is their confidence to operate outside established genre. SkinNotes contains Confessional and Imagist overtones without being dependent on either sensibility, creating enough space to manoeuvre and draw breath. ...[There are] moments of spellbinding clarity and quietude that stop the reader short in sheer admiration. ...a resonant tour-de-force."

• Link to Pree review

Mary Cresswell reviews *The Weight of Light" in Plumwood Mountain:
"The poems in this collection have an extraordinary range of topic and of voice... Reading the book we drift through various stages of being without any noticeable jolt as we go from one space to another. Everything makes sense in its place."

• Link to Cresswell review