Angela Costi’s new collection The Heart of the Advocate is fierce, compassionate, and principled. In these poems, Costi scrutinises childhood memories and legal history, revealing the rift between law and justice. These poems are alive with detail, and intimate, but also alert to intersecting kinds of violence: sexist, racist, class-based, legalistic and bureaucratic. This is an exemplar of poetic advocacy. (Lisa Gorton, acclaimed poet, novelist, literary editor)

With their moving narratives and precise images, Angela Costi’s poems trace the emergence of a committed and compassionate advocate from the womb to the schoolyard to the courtroom to the page, revealing that poetry, too, can be a potent form of justice. (Simone King, award winning poet and lawyer)