Ali Cobby Eckermann

In her new poetry collection, Inside My Mother, Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann explores the trauma created by family separation, felt as an interminable void in its darkest aspects, but in other ways a magical place 'beyond the imagination', populated by symbolic presences and scenes of ritual and commemoration.

Inside My Mother

Poetry. Aboriginal Australian Studies. Through a series of compact lyrics, Ali Cobby Eckermann's RUBY MOONLIGHT tells the story of a young Aboriginal woman in the late nineteenth century who survives the massacre of her entire family. Wandering alone through Ngadjuri land, in South Australia, she encounters a luckless Irish trapper whose loneliness matches her own. Drawn together for comfort, they discover a momentary paradise along riverbanks and across arid plains that proves fragile in the face of frontier violence and colonization. "These innovative poems take up traditional narrative voices, bringing past conflicts vividly to life with short lines that are lucid, refined, and luminous. Colonialism and survival are set against the natural world, love, and the desire for human engagement. The writing is delicate yet strong, the tone is pitched so well the reader is not distracted by the agile technique that carries the narrative forward."—Judges' citation, New South Wales Book of the Year Award

Ruby Moonlight

In Too Afraid to Cry, Ali Cobby Eckermann--who was recently awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world--describes with searing detail the devastating effects of racist policies that tore apart Indigenous Australian communities and created the Stolen Generations of "adoptees," Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their birth families. Told at first through the frank eyes of a child whose life was irretrievably changed after being "adopted" into a German Lutheran family, Too Afraid to Cry braids piercingly lyrical verse with spare prose to tell an intensely personal story of abuse and trauma. After years of suffering as a dark-skinned "outsider," Eckermann reveals her courageous efforts to reconcile with her birth family and find acceptance within their Indigenous community. Too Afraid to Cry offers a mirror to America and Canada's own dark history of coerced adoption of Native American children, and the violence inflicted on our continent's Indigenous peoples.

Ali Cobby Eckermann

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