The Heart of the Advocate

The Heart of the Advocate takes us on a poetic journey through the vicissitudes of the law and advocacy. Costi, a former lawyer of the Cypriot Greek diaspora, highlights the challenges of advocacy work and how this championing can uplift the lives of everyday Australians from marginal groups. This is a powerful, thought-provoking collection of non-fiction, memoir and biographical poetry.
- by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, award-winning poet and educator

Now in my fifties and many years after my time as a private lawyer, I reflect on what it means to be an advocate from the moment one is born. I return to a legal textbook and to family history, classroom lessons, literature and legal studies, law offices and finally, to acts of resistance against systemic inequality in order to get to the heart of being an advocate. Two previously divergent aspects of my experience are brought together – legal and poetic advocacy; I’m exploring their intersections. How can poetry be used as a tool for advocacy to somehow address how ‘the failure of justice lacerates, because it is, at bottom, an injury to life itself’ (Jane Hirshfield). Through poetry, legal language is reframed to tend to those wounds caused by injustices.
- Angela Costi, author of The Heart of the Advocate