If packing for the apocalypse include Ali’s ‘a brief letter to the sea about a couple of things.’ Dr Tamryn Bennett, ICAROS

Whitelock combines a gift for digging down to the deeper truth with a flair for creating metaphors that leave you gasping at their audacity. This is poetry with its mask off, its safety belt unfastened, its sense of humour intact. Poetry that dances where it chooses, and dares you to dance with it.  Magi Gibson, Wild Women of a Certain Age

While most poets write like they’re alive not to die, Ali Whitelock pleads for a poem that gives zero fucks––then rip-writes a bonfire of them. Darby Hudson, Confetti Tornado

Ali Whitelock’s zesty, blazing poems … vault with tenderness and fury between sea and flesh, the found and lost, the cherished and rejected. They are a tonic and a joy.  Dr Felicity Plunkett, A Kinder Sea

It’s an immediacy and an openness that makes you feel, when reading her poetry, that you have been friends your whole life and she is not only confiding in you but drawing out of you your own dark secrets so you can laugh at them together. Magdalena Ball, Bobbish (Read Magdalena’s full review here: https://compulsivereader.com/2023/07/05/a-review-of-a-brief-letter-to-the-sea-about-a-couple-of-things-by-ali-whitelock/)

Combines the ordinary and extraordinary, the amusing and the wounding, sometimes in a single line. It’s laugh-and-cry material, curving on a thought or image you didn’t see coming. She’s talking to YOU. Mark Mordue, Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave and Darlinghurst Funeral Rites

‘Let yourself take the bite of these forbidden poems. Let them melt in your mouth. The flavor, I assure you, will last through many tooth-brushings.’ Rochelle J Shapiro, Miriam The Medium, poet, reviewer, teacher. (Read Rochelle’s full review here: https://rochellejshapiro.com/review-of-ali-whitelocks-a-brief-letter-to-the-sea-about-a-couple-of-things/

Like a siren call, one cannot help to be drawn to Whitelock’s wit and charm, only to be caught off-guard by the power of her poetic focus, the craft of her lines, the way she frames our humanity through oranges, bacon, bunnings, and euthanasia hoods.  Peter Ramm, Waterlines and Winner of the Manchester Poetry Prize 2022

Honest and perceptive—around issues of love and its limits, bodies, the creep of loss, the general business of stumbling our way through the challenges of living in a complex and ever-shifting contemporary world. Dr Rose Lucas, This Shuttered Eye and Increments of the Everyday

Reading Ali Whitelock is being taken into the Rip, the churn of existence which throws you onto the reef and takes you off again, gasping at how relit the sky is in survival. It is a tumult of the utmost skill, exposing our foibles, needs, relationships, grief, failings and hopes for what they are – the frail tender of a human life, and the edges that bleed into other people, animals, and things where the personal details so much of all of us, maintaining a forensic narrative of sublime metaphor of the ordinary made stupendous. Profoundly affirming, while prowling the dents in us all, with humour zinging like a trapeze, and the politics of a fine scalpel, this is a book to rally to, the prose delivered with an incomparable wit and grace. You won’t be able to put it down, as you laugh, cry and shake your fist at the moon, again, and again, as you revel in its blinding intelligence, audacity, and truth. James Walton, Snail Mail Cursive