Liquid Amber Press (2026)
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit.
Sarah Rice is a poet, writer, art theorist and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, music and art. Her previous poetry collection, Fingertip of the Tongue (UWA Publishing, 2017), won the Eyelands International Book Award, and her practice has been widely recognised across poetry, visual art and interdisciplinary collaboration. Rice has also produced award-winning projects such as Text/ure, and has long been active in ekphrastic workshops, exhibitions, and collaborative work with artists across diverse media.
This latest collection sits at the crossroads of visual art and poetry, where the two artforms don’t passively sit side by side but actually shape each other.
It’s an ambitious book and a visually sumptuous one: Rice writes poems in response to a huge range of artwork – famous pieces and lesser-known ones, personal pieces and collaborations – while also including some of her own visual work. The result feels less like a collection of separate poems and more like one long, unfolding meditation on how we see, how objects and materials affect us, and where both words and images are needed to express the complexity of an idea.
It’s simultaneously poetry and philosophy.
In her opening essay, Rice explains that seeing isn’t a neutral act – we’re always caught up in what we look at. That idea sets the tone for the whole book. These poems aren’t trying to describe or explain the artworks but instead, they’re capturing the experience of encountering them for the first time. Rice states: “[there is] always some form of appeal – a yearning, a striving, a demand. Both poetry and art are a reach for – or forward.” (2)
I particularly admired sections in this book where Rice draws out the connections between visual and verbal craft: line, light, and the arrangement of space on a page. Her poems responding to the painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, for example, are a highlight – the muted colours and slanted light of his paintings are expressed in spare, careful language, with line breaks that mimic hesitation and sound patterns that create their own kind of light and shadow. There is close synergy between the poems and paintings:
The thing about light
– Slanting light
Coming in askance
Is not so much what is revealed
In its narrow sight
But how it illuminates
Beyond its borders (13)
The sheer range of visual material – paintings, photos, ceramics, typography, jewellery – requires the reader to keep shifting gears, not just between image and text but between very different styles and ideas which fits Rice’s interest in mixing disciplines and ‘the freedom of the space between.’
Rice challenges herself to balance delicate writing with hard truth. This is evident in poems dealing with tough political and personal territory, like her response to Myuran Sukumaran’s Another Day in Paradise. These poems grapple with death, injustice and the predestined, for instance the Bali 9 subject waiting for his execution. Rice handles this with care, focusing on small daily rituals and the texture of waiting:
A peel
of paint
curls its lip
Coils itself small
Has already tied
itself in knots
Paint can wait it out
Take its time
Dying is a lengthy business (32)
A similar tension shows up in more personal, grief-focused poems later in the book, especially the ones about her father. These are some of the most moving pieces, particularly when Rice focuses on the intimacy of objects like watches, kitchen tools and broken glass:
I look for you in the pots and pans, in your silver-
strapped watch. I don’t find you in the glass-
y-eyed photographs, or in the jar of dust (97)
One of the book’s most interesting threads is its focus on the process of making things – shaping clay, laying out type, composing an image – as a mirror for writing a poem. This raises questions for the reader about who ‘owns’ these poems: Rice, or the artworks that inspired them? The book doesn’t answer that, but it makes us question the messy, collaborative nature of creative work.
Materials and textures come up again and again, and light in particular works as both a subject and a structural tool – something that reveals and hides in equal measure. It’s a paradox: the closer these poems look at the physical world, the more they reveal its resistance to being fully captured in words.
One of the collection’s most evident achievements is the way it treats image and text as equal partners rather than one illustrating the other, and these poems put real emphasis on the physical, felt experience of encountering art. It’s a demanding read, but a rewarding one – the collection asks you to slow down and pay attention in the same way the poems themselves do.
Rice isn’t necessarily trying to hand readers a tidy interpretation – she’s inviting them into an intense, almost painful way of looking and thinking. To ‘alight’ means both to land and to illuminate. What we see clearly is not always resolved or properly understood: but that’s the point.