Maling?s new work is rich and diversity, exploring physical landscapes as well as historical and socio-cultural aspects of place. The work takes her increased interest in ecopoetics and feminist poetics from Border Crossingand refashions her rural WA landscape in unique ways.
In her debut collection, award-winning talent Caitlin Maling explores coming of age in contemporary Australia. Writing from Perth, Houston and Cambridge, Maling's early years to adulthood are told through the lens of the Australian landscape. For young settler Australians this is a place that both defines and undermines identity.
Caitlin Maling's second volume, Border Crossing, continues to showcase the development of an exciting new voice in Australian poetry. Now Maling's poems shift from the first volume's gritty treatment of childhood and adolescence growing up in WA, to a consideration of what it is to be an Australian in America, where the conflicting voices and identities of home and abroad jostle against and seek their definitions from each other. In this volume, as in the first, her emphasis on place - geography and environment - is as strong as ever.