Sarah Rice
Alight on all things precious
Liquid Amber Press, 2026
Alight on all things precious weaves together Sarah Rice’s ekphrastic poetry and luminous colour reproductions of both her own and others’ artwork. Poem and artwork are seen in light of each other.
The collection contains her recent work and examples from earlier projects, commissions, and collaborations with artists working across the fields of painting, glass, ceramics, metal, photography, and print. It invokes the pleasures and precariousness of the creative process, both visual and literary, the work of tending and attending, and touches on how matters move us – materially. How we both shape and are shaped by the things we touch, and that touch us. Alight on all things precious stirs up dust, shadows, ghosts, the missing, or merely hidden, and sets them dancing.
As alert to the textures of making as it is sensitive to the nuances of human connection and loss, Sarah Rice’s work thinks with its fingertips, using its intelligence to register what, like dust, might scarcely seem substantial. With her, the term ekphrasis outgrows the bounds of writing-about-pictures, into a truly multidisciplinary creativity that lives in the weave of things, the freedom of the space between.
Philip Gross, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize
Fingertip of the Tongue
UWA Publishing, 2017
This poetry collection explores how the self, the body and poetry are intimately connected in their various expressions, while obliquely mapping a personal history of loss, change and rejuvenation. Sarah Rice is fascinated by the flux, flow and harmonic resources of language, and entranced with the transformations words work on the world. These poems ruminate on connections between the imagination, the extraordinary and what is close at hand.
2018 Shortlisted - ACT Writing & Publishing Award for Poetry
“Sarah Rice writes poems of astonishing grace. To read her is to walk a hill and lose your limp and breathe your grief out among eucalypt leaves and return to your life smarter than you left it. Light and grave at once, bright with intelligence, masterfully made, and written with a musical ear, they dance ordinary days into epiphanies, suffering into wisdom, and they put a reader back inside the natural world, as if they’d never left it.”
About the Author
Sarah Rice is a Canberra poet and visual artist interested in the intersection between word and image. Her poetry collection Fingertip of the Tongue (UWAP) was shortlisted in the ACT Publishing Awards. Sarah won the inaugural Ron Pretty Poetry Award, the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, and co-won the International Writing Ventures, and Gwen Harwood Poetry Prizes. Sarah was shortlisted in the Montreal, Tom Howard, Drake-Brockman, CJ Dennis, New Millennium, Fish, Axel Clark, Michael Thwaites, and Overland poetry awards, amongst others. Publications include the Global Poetry Anthology, Award Winning Australian Writing, Best Australian Poetry, Island, Overland, Southerly, Aesthetica, The New Guard, ABR, and Australian Poetry Journal.
