The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Winner 2003

Judges report

Anything the Landlord Touches by Emma Lew (Giramondo)

Emma Lew's new poems are elegant and quixotic, enchanting and yet disturbing. Displaced from the personal as autobiographical Anything the Landlord Touches is instead a book of voices, un-named, unexplained and variously located through history's physical and psychic landscapes. These voices are like incursions into memory and possible perception; they are haunted and haunting, oracular but also playful, in phrasing that is arresting, lyrical, aleatory and seductive. The fragmentations and inconsistencies are allowed to co-exist: past with present, the rational with the illogical, the living with the dead. These poems are ambitious and thematically rich and work accumulatively to form a book of great resonance.