Book Launch of Luke Johnson's Kangaroo Unbound

Join Luke Johnson in conversation with Luke Carmen to officially launch Kangaroo Unbound.

Luke Johnson has worked closely with Teo Treloar over a number of years. Their work shares thematic and emotive resonances.

Kangaroo Unbound is a collection of 50 poems by Johnson that take their titles and inspiration from legendary Australian artist Garry’s Shead’s iconic ‘D.H. Lawrence’ series of paintings, which he produced in the early 90s in response to Lawrence’s 1923 novel Kangaroo.

Like the paintings, the poems range from the heavily influenced (those that lean into the source text with strong ekphrastic fidelity) to those that offer more abstracted and personal renderings. Traversing a range of forms from free verse to concrete, villanelle and sonnet, the poems draw from a host of readily identifiable national motifs in their effort toward a contemporary Australian mythology grounded in ‘Benevolence, Humour and Divine Mystery’.

Luke Johnson is a writer and academic from Wollongong, NSW. His poems, stories, essays and criticism have been widely published and performed in Australia and have won or been listed for numerous national prizes, including the AAWP Chapter One Prize, the Elizabeth Jolley Award, the Josephine Ulrick Award, the Katharine Susannah Prichard Award as well as several development fellowships. He is the author two books, the short-story collection Ferocious Animals (2021) and the poetry collection Kangaroo Unbound (Puncher & Wattmann 2025), a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong, and fiction editor of Australia’s oldest literary journal, Southerly.