In The sea with no one in it, Niki Koulouris takes readers from the mysterious and powerful depths of the ocean to the familiar and disparate artifacts of our land-locked daily lives.

Niki Koulouris was born in Melbourne, Australia, and is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and RMIT University. She has worked as a staff writer and editor at Victoria University. Her poetry and prose has appeared in The Cortland Review, Space, Subtext Magazine and The Age. A beer enthusiast, she has been known to start spontaneous lists on napkins of her top India Pale Ales. Niki lives in Toronto. The sea with no one in it is her first book.

Niki Koulouris' profile page

• Short-listed, Wesley Michel Wright Prize
• Short-listed, ReLit Awards, Poetry

'There is something entrancing about Koulouris's poetry. It makes readers want to dive deep within it, to drown. Its rhythms are intoxicating and, like a riptide, refuse to let go. The surface appearance of simplicity belies the poems' complex and daunting depth.'

Anthony Frame

'Niki Koulouris' poems take up the contemporary challenges of environmentalism and ekphrasis?poems about other kinds of artifice, including statuary and Stelarc?in a global frame. Her pithy, often punchy poems mix the sentimental with the acerbic, Alpine cigarettes with "Lolly Gobble Bliss Bomb bliss." Above all, Koulouris's topic is the sea that "never closes/unlike the sun," with all its mutability and absoluteness.'

Wesley Michael Wright Prize citation

The first section comprises a sustained seascape. Sound patterns and seductive brief phrases play off a metaphysical sense of the ocean, and its power over the imagination, against more concrete images and ideas. Words and phrases nudge against each other and form alliances.... [In] Part 2 ... a number of ekphrastic poems exuberantly inhabit the work of modern artists and ancient monuments. Some readers will readily relate to the evocations of the work of Anselm Kiefer, Philip Guston and Maurice Sendak, and to Berlin's Pergamon Museum. Others will be intrigued enough to seek out the originals.

Australian Poetry Journal

'In her debut poetry collection, Niki Koulouris stands, as many have before her, at the lip of the sea. New from the Porcupine's Quill press, The sea with [no one] in it is a sparse re-examining of the water that surrounds us, the preternatural body on our shores. The collection rattles with the detritus of land-meets-depths, as spare and exact as a ship in a bottle.'

The Telegraph-Journal

'One can sight in Kouloris's work the surrealism of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, but also the fabulous imagination of Leonard Cohen's Greek-flavoured poems and songs of the 1960s. Indeed, almost any stanza from Koulouris could be inserted into Cohen's "Suzanne."'

Maple Tree Literary Supplement