Lyrical and narrative-driven with playful and fantastical elements woven throughout, the poems in The Infant Vine reflect on how ordinary moments become charged with significance and strangeness when disaster strikes. Such moments make imaginary worlds possible: sleep deprivation transfigures a new mother into a leafy seadragon; a novel virus gives women the power to reproduce via parthenogenesis like the eponymous bonnethead shark.

Themes of transformation, metamorphosis and preservation—of life, of memory and the environment—permeate Isabella G. Mead’s debut collection. This is a rich and compelling exploration on caregiving and creativity in the context of global crises.

A compelling new voice in Australian poetry—Kate Middleton

Allusive and layered, spliced with humour and feeling, comfort and strangeness, Mead’s poetry illustrates with grace and fierce intelligence how ‘a poem is not a mirror—it responds’—Jo Langdon

Precise with detail and metaphor, these delightful poems are attentive to human and non-human bodies…they motivate courage and curiosity for the world to come—Jessica L. Wilkinson