Proverse Publishing

Some Dualities – Poetry Collection by former Proverse Poetry Prize winner Michael Witts

Winner of The Proverse Prize 2023

Some Dualities is a collection of most of the poems written by Australian poet Michael Witts in the last fifteen years. The poems are assembled by theme and style, celebrating the poet’s own life lived through his experiences of fatherhood, family, location and country.

Past and present intersect in this diverse body of works where Witts is able to traverse complex emotional landscapes. He writes succinctly using conversational, unadorned language, creating accessibility across a broad range of subjects. 

Using an idiosyncratic voice that is either specific to time and place or musing, the poet invites the reader to contemplate life’s inherent dualities. He pays homage to poets he loves and is inspired by, thereby celebrating their work alongside his own.

Sunset at Lion Rock – Novel by Matthew Wong Foreman

Winner of The Proverse Prize 2023

Nobody in Eric’s family talks about why photos of his Uncle Mikey are on every table, in every room. Years of silence, together with a relentless Buddhist upbringing, has Eric convinced he is Mikey’s reincarnation. But when a summer in the mountain temples of Lion Rock Hill results in a crisis of faith, Eric is confused by his feelings of betrayal. His growing understanding of his place in Hong Kong society and the circumstances surrounding his uncle’s disappearance compels him to question all that he has come to believe is true. And just like his uncle before him, Eric finds himself forced to choose between his family and himself.

Sunset at Lion Rock is a letter from a nephew to his uncle who died before he was born. It serves as a window into parts of a Eurasian child’s life which his family can never know, documenting his attempt to navigate racial confusion, religious trauma, the meaning of friendship, and the struggle for self-discovery in a shifting culture on the eve of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRO).

The Ballad of Billy Lopez – Novella by Stewart McKay

Winner of Best Hong Kong Author and Supplementary Prize Winner – The Proverse Prize 2023

Set in a small southern US town in the late 1980s, The Ballad of Billy Lopez is the story of Brad, a disaffected seventeen-year-old from a difficult home, whose Pa drinks too much and whose Ma tries her best, really she does. Brad sees the world for what it is, and performs tricks on anonymous men for money behind Yates’s wholesale. He recently got into one fight too many and had to start seeing a doctor. The Doc has asked him to start keeping a diary. Brad isn’t sold.

In class one day Brad is forced to work with straight-A dweeb, Billy Lopez, whose leg Brad just happened to break in a soccer game the month before (the latest in a long list of things that keep going wrong but are never Brad’s fault). The pair reluctantly strike up a partnership, before discovering more in common than they would ever have expected.

As Billy and Brad’s friendship develops, they find in one another things they lack in themselves. They spend the summer together: camping, drinking, talking, exploring… They grow closer, grow physical with one another – acts that Brad describes in his unique, matter-of-fact narrative style. Billy grounds Brad, and helps him to see that he is more than his upbringing, and that his dysfunctional family isn’t irredeemable. In turn, Brad teaches Billy how to let loose sometimes, to be a teenager; while realising that Billy’s cookie-cutter family life, with all its cable TV and en-suite bathrooms, isn’t quite what it seems.

What starts out as an awkward alliance between two very different boys develops into an impulsive, eye-opening, and ultimately devastating romance.