From the backroads of the Australian outback to the icy streets of Paris winter, these dynamic and original poems traverse geographies, languages and techniques. Marked by a subtle probing of the metaphysical layerings that underpin human experience, this exploration returns us again and again to the concrete details of everyday happenings. Drawing equally on moments of joy and loss, shifting from comic and bawdy bohemianism to introspective sensory envelopment, Awake at the Wheel evokes for us a dynamic and fragile world. This fragility is an insistent theme, both in terms of human mortality and ecological crisis. In our travels we are transported across a beautiful earth, through mental and spiritual zones bleached by consumer capitalism, and through country ravaged by mining. We pass amongst the ghosts of those who have gone before, the spirits of our loved ones, and of our cultural and literary inheritances. This is a collection of playful, innovative and imaginative poems, driven by a refined and attentive musicality, brimming with possibility and surprise. Berndt Sellheim is a poet, novelist and occasional academic.

He has taught creative writing and poetics at UTS, and lectured in philosophy at Macquarie University, where he completed a doctorate in phenomenology in 2008. His poetry and critical work have been published in periodicals such as Meanjin, Heat, Island, Overland, Best Australian Poems, Plumwood Mountain, Eyeline and The Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology. He is the author of the novels 'Beyond the Frame's Edge' (Fourth Estate, 2013) and 'Saint Vitus Dance' (Fourth Estate, Forthcoming).