Maria Takolander was born in Melbourne in 1973 to Finnish parents. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her poetry appeared regularly in The Best Australian Poems and The Best Australian Poetry, and it has been widely anthologised nationally and internationally, including in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). A program about Maria's poetry aired on Radio National in 2015, and she has performed her poetry on ABC TV and at numerous festivals, including the 2017 Medellin International Poetry Festival in Colombia. She won the inaugural Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and her short-story collection The Double (Text, 2013) was shortlisted for The Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award. Maria's words can also be found on bronze plaques in the Geelong CBD and at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.
'A deeply personal selection of poems ... Daring and engaging.' --Readings 'Unusual and fiercely intelligent, Trigger Warning will simultaneously unsettle you and set you alight.' --The Weekend Australian ""The poems in Trigger Warning take no prisoners; fiercely intelligent, mordant and uncompromising, they stare down difficult subjects - domestic violence, the body's frailty, the precarious future - with an unerring commitment to telling the truth, no matter the fallout. Whether sparring with confessional poets in spiky epistles, reconfiguring the seemingly banal surface of the domestic world, or divining the apocalyptic excesses of the late Anthropocene, Takolander fearlessly contemplates 'the battleground of reason's end, ' forging sense in a sea of senselessness. Enlivened with wit and leavened with irony, Takolander's poems are electrifying; their intellectual force is indisputable.' --Sarah Holland-Batt