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About

David Prater was born in 1972 in Dubbo, Australia. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Poems in journals

David’s poems have appeared in print and online journals, both in Australia and internationally.

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Poems in anthologies

David’s poems have also been republished in annual and irregular anthologies.

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We Will Disappear

Papertiger Media published David’s debut full-length poetry collection in 2007. We Will Disappear navigates the landscapes of loneliness and solitude, drawing on ten years of transformative travelogues and engaging elegies.

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What the reviewers said …

Prater’s half rhymes, alliteration and shuffle of syntax are heady. There’s often a parade of phonemes teasing you. You try to wrestle-hold the words but they spin you around as if you were a Jack Russell hanging onto a little boy’s tailcoat.

alicia sometimes ABC Radio National

Relentlessly racy, Prater hits hard and fast in his attempts to keep up with the wrenching juggernaut of our times.

Justin Clemens The Australian

In our information-saturated, hyper-connected, post-industrial world there is so much to take in, and Prater is able to call its tune.

Ryan Scott Cordite Poetry Review

Performances

David has performed numerous feature readings, as well as festival and spoken-word sets.

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Prose works

David’s stories, non-fiction and interviews have been published in various journals and other venues.

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Leaves of Glass

Puncher and Wattman published David’s second full-length poetry collection in 2013. Inspired by actual correspondence between Walt Whitman and Australian poet, Bernard O’Dowd, Leaves of Glass re-imagines both poets’ works.

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What the reviewers said …

There is even a translation of Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ into the language of LOLcats, that is, rewriting the poem as though by a cat (‘Gowayz Ob Lol: “O Kitteh! Meh Kitteh!”’).

Graeme MilesAustralian Book Review

Leaves of Glass is not an easy book, though it is highly rewarding, especially to a reader with some familiarity with Whitman’s work.

Sally Evans Cordite Poetry Review

Leaves of Glass is a complex, dense and multi-faceted book, but the premium Prater puts on fun means it is always a rollicking read. It is a book that is serious but never takes itself too seriously.

Liam Ferney Southerly

Leaves of Glass is a linguistically and structurally nimble work, constantly surprising and definitively idiosyncratic.

Fiona WrightThe Australian

Prater is merciless in pinpointing the atavism that binds our current version of nationalism to its nineteenth century archetypes—the virtue of this book is that it so effortlessly inhabits both periods simultaneously.

John Hawke Westerly

Morgenland

Vagabond Press published this limited-edition chapbook in 2007. The poems in Morgenland were all written in the Republic of Korea and Japan in 2005–06 as part of an Asialink residency.

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