The first full collection of poetry by Phil Kawana, The Devil in my Shoes is engaging and personable. 

Kawana’s childhood, where ‘Even the dog / was communal’, is the source of the poems’ strong and angry voice confronting political and social injustice: ‘We don’t allow / your kind in the house’, he was told by a friend’s mother at a birthday party. Powerful love poems and snippets of domestic life are held together by strong patterns of imagery. 

‘I want to change the world / almost as much as my son / wants a new pair of shoes’, writes Kawana, and this collection expresses the triumphs and frustrations of that attempt.

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More about Phil Kawana 

Reviews

Kawana’s voice is engaging, able to shift gear from lyricism to anger, the literary to the colloquial. – Mark Williams