What the mirror tells
Denise O'Hagan
Poetry collection
5 Islands Press, September 2026
Paperback, 88 pp, 129 x 198 mm
ISBN 978-1-923248-29-8
RRP AUD $28.00
About this book
Can conversations linger after their speakers are gone, curtains hang more heavily on some days, or we recall what we never knew? What the Mirror Tells invites us into a world where mini-fictions meet memoir, where commonplace objects acquire a curious and often unsettling edge. These are poems of implication and suggestion, reverberating sequences in which reflections speak as eloquently as fact, where a young bellringer brings the houses outside to shuddering point; the knowledge held by a hallway mirror outlasts its owner; and ancestral presences are as alive as a paediatric surgeon in a Boston hospital—and far more capricious. Whether it is the act of perception which brings about such transformation, or whether the objects or situations themselves are innately transformative, the reader must decide.
‘O’Hagan’s unmistakable voice plays medium to unsettling encounters with memory, imagination and the feminine occult, inviting us to glimpse secrets hidden beyond human understanding…’
Audrey Molloy
‘Poems that cast a spell of otherworldly beauty over our everyday lives.’
Peter Boyle
‘Poems formed by place, space, location and person that provide a sudden sense of liberation from time and space limits.’
Magdalena Ball
About the author
Denise O’Hagan is a Sydney-based poet and editor of New Zealand background, born and raised in Italy. She has a background in commercial book publishing in Routledge, Collins and Heinemann (London) and Horwitz, Cambridge University Press and the State Library of NSW (Sydney), and set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press in 2015 through which she assists independent authors.
Her poetry is published widely, and her awards include the Dalkey Poetry Prize, the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize and the NSW Poetry Prize. She is co-editor on The Marrow International Poetry.
What the Mirror Tells is her third poetry collection.
Available from 5 Islands Press
Praise for What the Mirror Tells
