The Hum Hearers

• • Shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award.
  • The Hum Hearers is the second poetry collection by Shey Marque. Her first collection was shortlisted for the Noel Rowe Poetry Award.
  • A moving memoir collection about intergenerational trauma with threads of scientific biomedical science and molecular pathology instilled by Marque's experience as a research scientist.

A haunting exploration of the intricate ties between our genetic legacy and environmental echoes.

Cassandra Atherton

The powerfully evocative The Hum Hearers connects imagination, memory and embedded feeling. These are beautifully conceived, salutary and wonderfully transportative poems.

Paul Hetherington

Brilliantly observational and meditative, the poems in The Hum Hearers detonate like muffled explosions. Generational trauma is counterbalanced by hidden wells of resilience and subterranean solidarities. The poems, written in sprung prose, offer the counter-memories of women held together by the cycles of life that fall upon them with quiet devastation. The piquant aphorisms and subtle epiphanies in these poems rewrite the banalities of experience in a newly epic register.

2023 Dorothy Hewett Award judges