Two Tongues
by Maria van Neerven

‘Two Tongues is a stunning, masterful debut. Tender and fierce, exacting and generous, these poems herald the arrival of an important new voice. In soulful poems that sing of family, culture, love and community, van Neerven deftly unpicks the brutal colonial stitches that bind this place to history’s lies, and lays bare searing, healing Blak truths.’

‘With defiant truth-telling and with immense heart, Maria van Neerven's poems are generous, uncompromising, humane songs that invite the reader to “surrender to the clay and ash / of this landscape” and to listen deeply. Unpretentiously inventive and utterly real, Two Tongues brings family, culture, politics and art into revelatory conversation.’

‘Maria van Neerven’s Two Tongues holds great loss and grief, joy and humour, sorrow and anger. But what pulses most powerfully through this collection is great love: of family, of community, of each other. Van Neerven reminds us that the shameful history of this country is always wound into the present, yet her poems resist the cliché of division, choosing instead to interrogate with intelligence and empathy.’

‘This collection connects the reader into the world of the author in an incredibly visceral way whilst illuminating the broadest structures and attitudes that have impacted on Aboriginal people throughout colonisation, shown through exploration of generations of an Aboriginal family. The themes within the work of growing up, injustice, protest and forgiveness are crafted to provide a rich narrative thread.’

‘Two Tongues is not a tidy collection but a living, multilingual body that pulses between grief and love. It is not an easy work to move through, with language that cuts, stutters and reshapes itself. [This] work so raw and deliberate exists, insisting on remembering what Australia too often chooses to forget.’