Christopher Palmer was born in Brisbane in 1969 and raised in the UK. He has lived in many places since returning to Australia in 1987, and currently lives in Canberra, where he completed a PhD in the biological sciences in 2005. He’s happiest in the ecotone between the arts and sciences, and moves habitually between both. His poetry has been published since 2002. The poems in this volume range across forms, subjects, geography and time, exploring the kinds of relationships that people have. Afterlives is his first collection. Of the poems ‘Gallipoli, dawn’ and ‘Epitaph’, Gig Ryan writes, ‘Gallipoli tourists “stand like crosses”, or a television establishes its “reich”, that is, his unique vision unearths a bleak, though sometimes darkly humorous, landscape of turmoil from what had previously seemed familiar and benign.’