SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Judges’ Comments And to Ecstasy is a work of witness to the layered spaces of history: ‘a voice singing to itself / above the spectacle of flame’. Agile and attentive, these poems map transits, moving between named and nameless places, ‘breath[ing] the momentary’ but probing beyond the corporeal and material to consider the spectral and spiritual. Open to mystery and discovery, the poems are openings, invitations to consider the flickering and provisional nature of human lives. And to Ecstasy begins with the body in motion, expanding into the metaphysical and mystical. Mossammaparast’s is a poetic voice of great inventiveness and integrity. The poems are fresh and vital as they explore the transnational and political in novel ways. Mobile fragments suggest the exilic, while returns and echoes evoke forms of repair the work moves towards in its embrace of the ecstatic. Translation, transition and transcendence recur as motifs in this exhilarating collection. Endorsements “Mossammaparast’s voice is ‘a raspberry burst, / catching us off-guard’. Wildly itinerant, always incisive, And to Ecstasy is a radiant second collection that weighs the poet’s myriad moorings to illuminate the contingencies of anchorage, the soul’s cartography. These poems are a compelling injunction against ‘the brittle lodgings of fear’ and a questing celebration of the numinous.” —Jaya Savige “Mossammaparast dispels any credence that a sophomore collection may struggle to live up to a brilliant debut. Here, the opposite is true. I should know. And to Ecstasy uses language shrewdly – cartographically, even – to compose a unique marvel of language, a bricolage of yesses and wants and plane tickets that not only plumb how limber time and recollection are, but the physical spaces these human interpretations bubble out in real time. Her lines are titanium-sturdy. And they’re dressed fabulously. They focus her observations as acute or more than what the Tytonidae and Strigidae families achieve: hunting, preying and spiralling over an elemental vastness deep in the fractal that is the author.” —Kent MacCarter, Director, Cordite Publishing Inc. “As the scope of poems in the volume demonstrates, That Sight exemplifies the thrilling possibilities and futures for Australian writing—simultaneously looking inward and outward across cultures and identities that are inherited and inhabited, borrowed and assigned. Marjon Mossammaparast is to be congratulated for her outstanding first volume that impressed itself on the judges in compelling ways. Mossammaparast’s is a unique voice in contemporary Australian Literature, and one that we look forward to hearing more from in the future.” —The Mary Gilmore Award Citation 2019

About the Book: And To Ecstasy is a poetic journey through space and time, projecting a transcendental element of reality. In her exquisite poems, Marjon Mossammaparast explores the physical experience of being human, bound to four dimensions, matching it with the belief we are also spirit beings. At its core, this work contemplates the desire to move beyond the limitations of bodies, and into an expanded metaphysical notion of identity, carried by intuition. In its arrangement in three parts, the poet uses displaced fragments and mere glimpses; through call and response of landscapes and countries, there is a constancy and insistence of reconciliation. This is the language of the exile: not just geographically transposed, but through a spirit constrained by the physical and seeking return home— “Where all that is vibrant vibrates beyond the sticking place of names to the borderfields where signs change their value: Split a piece of wood, and I am there; lift up the stone, and you will find me.” About the Author: ­Marjon Mossammaparast is a secondary school teacher of English residing in Melbourne. Her poetry has been published in The Weekend Australian Review, Southerly, Island, Mascara Literary Review, Contrappasso and Australian Poetry Journal, as well as Antipodes (US) and The Moth Magazine (UK). Her poem The Spanish Revelation was longlisted for the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize in 2016. Her first book, That Sight (Cordite Books, 2018), was awarded the Mary Gilmore Award. Cover Artwork by Penny Coss