Cover Image: APS state final coordinator and Perth Slam MC, Allan Boyd with the nine finalists of the WA Final at the Rosemount Hotel.

WA Final – Australian Poetry Slam 2025
Rosemount Hotel, Saturday 23 August

Nine poets. Two rounds. Two minutes per poet. Five judges per round selected by raffle from the audience. Two prizes: $1000 for the winner, $500 for the runner-up, and a trip to Sydney for both to represent WA at the national finals of the Australian Poetry Slam 2025.

After four WA Heats – a hot one at the Bunbury Fringe Festival back in January and three additional heats at the Rosemount Hotel in August – the final judgement has arrived.

No pressure, then. Let’s go.

Last year’s APS winner Jo Giles – according to master of hyperbole APS WA coordinator Allan Boyd aka the Anti-poet, “the most important poet in the world” – is on hand to warm up the eager crowd at the Rosie before the battle proper begins.

Brilliant, witty, a deadpan delivery – you can see why they took the national 2024 crown. “I’m thinking about the space between moments, I’m thinking about frontier war memorial monuments, I’m thinking about hand-knitted possum socks, I’m thinking about drag queens on TikTok.”

Jazz kicks off Round One with a suitably jazzy if restrained riff on our place in the universe, existential dread and self-worth. “This place is not forever, it is a mere breath in the fabric of time… It’s a phenomenon to be here at all and yet we have made it such an embarrassment.”

Stacey – vulnerable, authentic – mellifluously milks a military metaphor as she relates perhaps too metronomically a case of workplace harassment. 

“Here I stand on display with all the bullet holes from a man twice my age shooting through the loopholes,” declaims this “civilian, noncombatant,” lamenting that “HR saw the bullets but won’t call the ambulance.”

Sari is polished in both voice and gesture, deploying her bibliophilic metaphors and poetic conceits with metaphysical aplomb. “My body is a library. You can run your fingers along my shelves and you might find what you’re looking for, or you can peer into my dark corners with a head torch if you dare.”

Ace of Hearts is slightly nervous but raw and honest, his meditation on sexuality, safety and the persistence of outdated social mores powerful and touching.

“I will play whatever price I must to have this breathing space of total acceptance, love and authenticity… But I would rather cease to exist than spend another day bending myself into the mould crafted out for me by a society that is sick.”

Bunbury heat winner Kym Dee is not only an extraordinary performer but has an impressive range of poetic and rhetorical devices at her disposal which she deploys with an enviable satirical edge. 

Yes, loud power tools and loud babies are annoying – unless, of course, they’re yours. She extolls the virtues of power tools over babies. “Unlike power tools, you can’t leave an infant in a shed for years… legally.”

Fraught familial relationships came powerfully to the fore as Abigail’s apostrophe to a birth parent sets the air vibrating with a series of forthright declarations before acknowledging “I can’t deny all of the above and when push comes to shove you made me, but it was down to the ones that stuck around to shape me.”

Laura powerfully relates their traumatic early experience, “The night I celebrated my 18th birthday, what was never yours to take. You didn’t just rape me, you rewrote me, took my name and scribbled broken over every inch. That night fear stole my voice.” It is however a reclamation of self rather than and admission of victimhood.

Kalopsia stridently addresses the injustices of discriminatory identification. “Why are you so invested in what I’ve got going on down below? When did genitalia become something we need to disclose and why are you so upset as if it’s something we chose?” Earnest and confident.

The First Round comes to a witty end with Shae’s straight-bat take on the advantages of AI relationships over flesh-and-blood partners: “And I confess I’ve asked it things I’d never dare to say to a lover, a psych, to myself on a good day… It doesn’t flinch, doesn’t sigh, doesn’t say ‘that crap again’.”

The judges’ scores collated, five poets return to the stage for the Second Round.

This time, Sari delves into the distractions of streaming and social media, again with a refined sense of theatre. “And remember,” as she begins her frighteningly perspicacious peroration, “this synthetic phase, it’s just a craze, it’s just humanity going through a difficult stage, it’s us scratching and biting, it’s us swapping tales, it’s just us eating ourselves starting at the fingernails.”

Tonally, Laura picks up where she left off. “I wasn’t scared of love. I just wasn’t into them. You see, I thought I hated their touch because one of them broke me. No one told me it might be because I was never meant for them.” Bold, emphatic, memorable.

Abigail draws on a children’s nursery rhyme to devastating effect. “Miss Muffet could sense the approach of the spider in the alleyway stinking of darts and cider.” Unwelcome male attention again comes to the fore.

Kalopsia goes for the environmental jugular. “The situation’s already severe, mother nature’s austere, this is our final frontier, nothing we can dog ear and ignore…” Both paean and cri de Coeur. 

Kym Dee sends the temperature skyrocketing with a hilarious take on writing crap, “it rushes and gushes in liquid slick stanzas… it keeps coming out… I wanted to write something beautiful. But the 9-year-old in me wants an entire poem about poo. So apologies to you, but this is what I must do.” The refrain “It keeps coming out” is worth the ticket price alone.

And the victors? Runner-up, Abigail. Winner: Kym Dee. Congratulations to all not only for making it this far, but for such an entertaining and thought-provoking afternoon. Hats off to the organisers and judges. Bring on Sydney!

NB as quotations from the poems were written down during live performance, no attempt has been made to use verse format.

See here for more information on Perth Slam and how to get involved.