Author: mascara

Desolation

by Hossein Asgari

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761154133

Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA

In 1988, civilian flight Iran Air 655 was shot down by U.S. Navy guided missiles while on its daily route from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. All 290 passengers and crew onboard were killed. An investigation into the incident found a succession of errors by the crew of USS Vincennes, concluding in two naval officers pressing at least 28 incorrect buttons to confirm the firing of the missiles. The U.S. government characterised the killings as an instance of “mistaken defensive action” – an error for which then-President George Bush awarded the captain with the Legion of Merit medal, as well as Navy Commendation medals for the two officers in their ‘heroic achievement’ of combat systems management (1).  

The tragedy of IR655 is unknown to most outside of Iran, including the narrator of Hossein Asgari’s Desolation. In this frame narrative, a fiction writer in an Adelaide café is accosted by a stranger insistent on him retelling his story of “truth”. The stranger, Amin – though that may not be his real name – knows the downing of IR655 intimately. It is his centre; the point from which his life pivots. Amin’s brother, Hamid, was one of the 290 passengers. Over ensuing meetings, the brutish Amin engages the writer in a one-sided confessional, divulging the chaos of love, loss and revenge spawned in the slipstream of his brother’s death. 

Consistent with his debut novel, Only Sound Remains (2), Asgari is intentional with constructing a world of binaries to explain the Iranian condition. East vs West, Regime vs Revolution, Old vs New, or rather, Old vs Ancient. Readers enter Desolation through two doors. The introduction quotes both the Quran, ‘And reckon not those who are killed in Allah’s way as dead: nay; they are alive (and) are provided sustenance from their Lord,’ as well Bhagavad Gita (as famously referenced by Robert Oppenheimer), ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of the worlds.’ Superficially, these conflicting quotes purport to mimic the most classic binary of Good vs Evil. Yet the particularity of referencing martyrdom and nuclear weaponry is an almost comical nod to the specific modern politics of Iran, where religion and violence do not contest, but collide. Interpreting Desolation demands understanding this doublespeak. In this book, as in the lives of Iranians, opposites are not so simple. 

Since the Revolution of 1979, those both within the country and in diaspora have largely divided into two camps that favour directly contrasting ideologies. Those in favour of the theocratic regime see its opponents as vessels of Western imperialism, while these opponents see regime supporters as extremists betraying the Iranian people. In Desolation, this spectrum is primarily represented by Amin’s brothers: ‘Hamid… an almost atheist (or as Vahid called him, the West-Maniac)’ and ‘Vahid, the devout Muslim (or as Hamid dubbed him, the Sheik)’ (p11). The brothers stand in as one-dimensional narrative cushions to freely absorb all stereotypes. Hamid has the ‘logical brain’ (p14) – trained in mathematics, dispassionately objective, appreciative of Western intellectualism and classical music. Meanwhile, Vahid is a man of purely theistic reasoning, moving from prayer to emotional outbursts at Hamid’s provocations. The traits portrayed by the two characters are depthless – almost satirically so. Hamid’s intellectual superiority fails him in his morality, for example, telling Amin, ‘[when] someone can benefit from it, then it’s only logical to lie’ (p17). Meanwhile, Vahid struggles to be cognisant of his own behavioural irony, yelling at Hamid, ‘screw you!’, as he leaves for the mosque (p16). The brothers exist exactly and only in response to each other; an inverse relationship reflecting the hollowness of political polarisation. With no shared traits but an equal outwards repulsion, Hamid’s insistence to be X forces Vahid to be Y, and vice versa. Neither is able to possess true self-determination, both instead suffering a loss of their own dimensionality. Establishing the division between the brothers early on positions these characters as both political and poetic signposts; stagnant constants between which nuance can be located. 

It is fitting then that the principal challenger of Iranian binaries in Desolation is its female characters. Commendably, a recognisable objective of Asgari’s work is to communicate the inherently patriarchal nature of the Islamic Regime. In Only Sound Remains, Asgari executed this through a paternal character’s unrequited love for Forough Farrokhzad – the feminist Iranian poet who often wrote on sex and sensuality – leading to her death. In Desolation, a Farrokhzad-esque character returns in the form of Amin’s neighbour, Parvaneh. 

Parvaneh is the young daughter of a family who move from Tehran to Amin’s hometown of Mashhad to gain safety from the war. Upon meeting, Amin immediately perceives Parvaneh as ‘different’ on a superficial spectrum of Westernisation. She is unlike the girls he knows who ‘didn’t wear any make-up and neither tweezed their facial hair nor plucked their eyebrows’ (p13). After sharing a secret phone call, the two begin meeting at Parvaneh’s house alone, enacting classics Western “dates”. They watch Western movies, listen to Western music, kiss, and steal alcohol to drink from her parents’ stash. It is through Amin’s lens that Parvaneh’s house is constructed as an Eden, with Parvaneh playing the role of Eve. She is sinful and sensual; as sickly sweet as the ‘sugar cube from the sugar bowl’ he toys with when discussing her with Hamid (p17). 

While Amin portrays Parvaneh to the reader as his temptress, his internal monologue betrays any semblance of his own pureness. His desires for her stem from a craving for possession and power. He lusts for her even as he critiques her, ‘He was aroused. Not because of the make-up, which he could tell was done poorly, but because she had done all that for him’ (p35). As their relationship develops, his surface level understanding of her as “a girl who plucks her eyebrows” does not. Rather, his growing sexual fantasies override his perception of her humanity. This dynamic is at its most critical when Parvaneh reveals that she, like Farrokhzad, is a writer, and Amin asks her to read him a story even though ‘he wasn’t really interested’ (p40): ‘She stood there for a moment as though she wasn’t sure why she had the notebook in her hand, vulnerable and fragile,’ Amin thinks, ‘like a young girl who was about to get undressed in front of someone for the first time in her life’ (p41). 

Importantly, Parvaneh’s story cleverly serves as a metaphor for the Islamic Regime. In her auto-fictive piece about a girl named Shadi – meaning joy – she writes: ‘On the school bus, Shadi is thinking about how she would love to wear a yellow scarf the same colour as the butter in her sandwich when two fire engines overtake the bus; their sirens, loud, almost angry, pierce her ears. Is there any resemblance between that fierce noise penetrating one’s ears and losing one’s virginity? She wonders’ (p43). Moving from the contrasting elements of a school bus to sex via ‘loud, almost angry sirens’ is a purposeful clash of binaries by Asgari. A child’s daydreams are aggressively interrupted, her innocence invaded. Simultaneously, the reality of her “innocence” is also challenged, as readers must consider the double meaning of ‘scarf’. Does Shadi dream of a knitted item to be worn in the cold? Or is it more likely that she instead refers to the headscarf required to be worn of school-attending girls in Iran? Readers being forced to contend with this story within a story (within a story) is a further manifestation of the complexity of Iranian subjugation. The question of “freedom” as false joys. The past, and perhaps even the future, as simply more colourful fictive versions of existing oppression. Consistent with the rest of their interactions, the story is something about Parvaneh that Amin is unable to comprehend: ‘‘I think it’s very good,’ he lied. He had found it slow and boring’ (p45). 

Asgari further likens Amin’s apathetic sexual gaze to the Regime’s gendered violence through the introduction of another female character, Marziyeh. Like Parvaneh, Amin first perceives Marziyeh on a superficial spectrum of Westernisation, as a woman in a ‘black Arab chador’ (p77). Again, like Parvaneh, this perception does not develop but grows increasingly sexualised: ‘Amin didn’t want to be around Marziyeh either. Was it because she was still young and beautiful, with her coffee-coloured skin and black eyes? Because wrapped from head to toe in that black cloth and silence, he found her irresistible?’ (p83). Even as Amin concludes he ‘could never love a woman like her, conservative and ordinary’ he still ‘desire[s] her… staring at her body under that long black chador… on her knees, her upper body straight, rubbing the cleaning liquid off the glass door’ (p87). Like Hamid and Vahid, Marziyeh and Parvaneh are Iranians existing in opposition. Yet while the male characters do so through their own self-representation, the female characters are assigned their positions purely by Amin’s perception. Ultimately and most pertinently: neither women are safe from his dehumanisation, as no women are safe under the Regime’s patriarchal rule. 

While Desolation is successful in collapsing binaries amongst Iranians, it conversely bolsters problematic distinctions between the Middle East and the West. Asgari has argued: ‘what fiction can achieve that historical texts cannot, is illustrate the interior life of people. And I think by doing that novels can get closer to certain social and psychological truths that a history book cannot lay claim to… [we] should include as many perspectives as possible in order to get closer to the “truth” (3). This expansive pursuit of truth through the personal is a valid feat. Afterall, as the saying goes, the personal is political. Asgari enacts this by sidelining the actual downing of IR655 to instead explore its ricochet effects through Amin. Yet by placing inadequate weight on the event itself, what Asgari identifies as ‘his grief… his not-so-elegant understanding of fate, and faith, and free will’ (4) struggle to locate plausible grounding. Instead, the “true” Iranian experience collapses inwards. Amin descends into sexual depravity, cruelty and religious devotion. When the book climaxes with Amin almost joining Al Qaeda, Iranians return to violent geopolitics as our immoveable base. Most dangerously, the conversation on terror in the Middle East is reduced to being understood as a response that is not only equal to trauma, but also intrinsically cultural. 

At the time of writing this review, the U.S and Israel have launched operations against the Islamic Regime. Ayatollah Khameini and many of his leadership team have been declared dead. Iranians, and many others, have continued the outwards drift to ideological opposites. Perhaps the most prevailing lesson Desolation can provide through its mediations on “truth” is the starkest one: that the greatest threat remains the loss of our humanity. To be made as Amin becomes and remains even at the novel’s conclusion, unable to be decisive of his own actions, enacting a cruelty that knows neither reason nor end. In the West’s eastward gaze, these Iranian stories are just things that happen In That Part of The World. Rumi wrote long ago: ‘the Friend comes into my body looking for the centre, unable to find it, draws a blade, strikes anywhere’ (5). Yes, these are things that happen in that part of the world. What Desolation warns us against is making these traumas our centre and mistaking these narratives for our only “truth”. 

NOTES

1. Ghasemi, J (2004) Iran Chamber Society: History of Iran – Shooting Down Iran Air Flight 655.
2. Asgari, H (2023) Only Sound Remains. Puncher & Wattmann. 
3. Asgari, H (2026) Matilda Bookshop: Hossein Asgari Q&A.
4. ibid. Rumi, J and Barks, C (1996) The Essential Rumi. Harper.

ROUMINA PARSA is an Iranian Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.

Astraea

by Kate Kruimink

Weatherglass Books

ISBN: 9781739570767

Reviewed by FERGUS EDWARDS

Astraea is set on board a ship transporting female convicts from England in the early 1800s. We do not see them depart, and we will not see them arrive: they will never be on solid ground. The crew is entirely male, the cargo entirely female, and we share the anxious bemusement of the fifteen-year-old convict Maryanne Maginn as she and her ‘maybe-friend Sarah Ward’ (p.9) negotiate existence inside ‘a series of confines between which she might move but not escape’ (p.44). The two of them join a group of women who might be prostitutes, madwomen, and witches aboard the fictional Astraea: named after an immortal virgin from Greek mythology, the near homophone is surely not accidental. The novella shows us individual and collective persistence in the face of barely constrained institutionalized and systemic violence, and Kate Kruimink ensures that it is the women, and not the violence, who are in the foreground. 

The book establishes the truth of these voyages by printing a facsimile image of a ‘List of the Female Convicts on Board the Lady Penrhyn’ (p.2) from the National Library of Australia before its opening sentence. The list is just one of the thousands of surviving contemporary records that we have of transportation; yet from the driest bureaucratic files to the most emotionally charged diary entries, almost every source seems to have been written by a man. Even the pre-eminent study of transportation, Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, which calculates that one in every seven transported convicts was female – ‘about twenty-four thousand’ (1) women in total – quotes from material sent to wives or about female convicts, but does not offer a single extended quotation from a transported woman in the twenty pages (of six-hundred and seven) that are devoted to them.

By contrast, the male voice—and gaze—is a rare, unwanted intrusion in Astraea.  Here, women are the subjects of their own sentences, speaking for themselves and among themselves. Mary Christie, for example, can rely on the other women getting the joke when she declares herself to be either a witch, or a madwoman, or a criminal: they ‘had got the measure of each other […] almost immediately’ (p.10). Less conspicuously, the text resists the administrative division of the women into either specific individuals or undifferentiated groups, often attributing experiences to ‘her,’ ‘she,’ or ‘the girl,’ allowing a meaningful sense of a female collective to emerge.

Giving these women voices is one of the many ways in which Astraea can be read as an exploration of haunting. Haunting requires a past that insists on being present; but it also requires that the present is resisting the past. Colonial England attempted to forget these women by transporting them to the other side of the world; but we forget them a second time if we fail to notice the absence of their voices in the written record. That makes their re-apparition here very welcome. 

Other hauntings are more complicated. The central character was christened ‘Marie Antoinette’, but, through a crude act of abbreviation by a lazy bureaucrat writing a list of convict names, she has been re-named ‘Maryanne’. Numbed after her newborn child was stripped from her at birth, she is determined to entertain only those thoughts that will help her survive transportation,

Maryanne welcomes the new name as an opportunity to obliterate her past self. She actively chooses to ‘scrape her mind clean like a farrier scraping a horse’s hoof’ (p.15) as she tries to create an untrammeled self; one that might be ‘fifteen in body, but truly, as a person, […] far younger even than that. She was quite new’ (p.18). 

While she observes and occasionally engages with life on the ship, Maryanne is haunted by memories she does not want. Surrounded by water she cannot drink, she recalls ‘a poem about that, […] precisely that’ (p.14), though she does not ‘know it beyond a few words and a suspicion that it might speak to her’ (p.15). Those few words are, naturally, ‘water, water, everywhere,’ (p.15), from Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,’ Coleridge’s poem of a sailor’s ‘thirsty and unlucky’ (p.15) survival at sea. Despite Maryanne’s reaffirmation that ‘memory was not her business’ (p.15), the words trigger memories of her mother ‘joyless and grey and with no heart for poetry’ (p.14).  Maryanne’s attempt to reject a traumatic past and choose an untainted future has a clear emotional logic, but the lines from the poem recur twice more in the novella, again accompanied by unwanted memories ‘of the mother of the girl with the French name’ (p.32) as the memories will not be resisted. The use of the poem resonates further, suggesting that Maryanne may even be haunting her future self: Kruimink’s first, Vogel award-winning novel, A Treacherous Country, is set in van Diemen’s Land some years after Astraea, and it quotes both ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ as it follows a young man searching for ‘a woman called Maryanne Maginn’ (2). 

On board the Astraea, Maryanne is committed to the solitary darkness of the coal hole as a punishment with not a dead albatross but ‘a thick glass bottle of water […] hung on a cord about her neck’ (p.57). Amidst desperate hallucinations of her lost child, she hears the cry of an actual newborn and her ‘breasts began to prickle with milk’ (p.65). Her body remembers her own baby and Maryanne is overwhelmed by the ‘ache of a particular absence’ (p.65). Later, barely aware of what she is doing, Maryanne acts as a wet-nurse, able to offer relief and sustenance and a degree of hope only because of her own loss. Kruimink’s spare, emotive writing presents these as human acts without comparing, measuring, or justifying them; the absence of a utilitarian calculus suggesting that each of our griefs is irreducibly private. In Maryanne’s case, it is only when she allows herself to fully acknowledge the suffering ‘she knew and had always known’ (p.65) that she can begin to live again.

One question raised by Astraea’s hauntings is whether we can, or, perhaps more properly, whether we should, try to forget experiences of trauma. Are we right to be frightened by the fate of the mariner, cursed never to forget his own dreadful story? In the case of the real-life women who were transported the answer seems obvious: effacing their lives means misunderstanding our own Australian history. Even if the story scares us, their lives are worthy of remembrance in and of themselves. We owe them each the belated recognition of their own particular human dignity. Memorialising them is necessary work, and Astraea aids it. In the case of the individual human being, especially a mother suffering the immeasurable pain of losing a child, the answer is far more difficult. Perhaps we cannot understand ourselves without acknowledging our deepest traumas. Perhaps our integrity, our dignity, our sense of self depends upon such an acknowledgement, however unutterably painful. Not the least of Kruimink’s achievements is creating a space in which we can consider such a confronting possibility.

Cited

1. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (Vintage, 2003), p. 244
2. K. M. Kruimink, A Treacherous Country (Allen & Unwin, 2020), p. 14.

FERGUS EDWARDS is a Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania.  His research interests centre on the relationships between literature, performance, and philosophy, particularly the plays of Tom Stoppard and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Fergus’s next academic publication will be in Modern Drama, discussing Stoppard, Havel, and plays of censorship.

The Vegetarian 채식주의자

by Han Kang

translated by Deborah Smith

Granta

ISBN: 9781846276033

Reviewed by JASMINE DARWIN

Does Eating Meat Make You Squirm? Try Going Without It. No, Really

 Set in contemporary South-Korea, The Vegetarian, 채식주의자 written by Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith, is a gripping novel that follows one woman’s slow descent into insanity as she struggles to come to terms with the threads of her own destiny. Split into three novelettes, in the first, The Vegetarian, we watch protagonist Yeong-hye through the eyes of her husband, Mr Cheong, an egotistical, self-serving salaryman who cannot help but gawk at her downfall through a self-pitying eye. At first, he may gain our sympathies: his diet is ruined, and his wife, who suddenly refuses to eat meat, will not cook the bountiful, blood-adorned meals he once upon feasted. ‘How on earth could she be so self-centred?’ he asks, looking down at his bowl of misty seaweed soup while dreaming of the ‘caramelised deep-fried belly pork’ (p.13) and the ‘wafer-thin slices of beef’ (p.15) his wife once fed him. But our sympathies are short-lived. 

As Yeong-hye’s body shrivels, and her sanity slips into a state of clear and utter delirium, Mr Cheong fails to see his wife as a figure worthy of his empathy and instead turns himself into the victim of gross injustice. 

I thought I could get by perfectly well just thinking of her [his wife] as a stranger, or no, a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order. But it was no easy thing for a man in the prime of his life…to have his physical needs go unsatisfied for such a long period. So yes, on nights when I returned home late and somewhat inebriated after a meal with my colleagues, I would grab my wife and push her to the floor…She put up surprisingly strong resistance and, spitting out vulgar curses all the while, one time in three I would manage to successfully insert myself. Once that happened, she lay there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, her face blank, as though she were a ‘comfort woman’ dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services.
(emphasis added, p.30)

Unable to see beyond his own desires, he discounts Yeong-hye’s protest as childish. But Mr Cheong is also not so oblivious. The clarifier is loaded with guilt: So yes, Mr Cheong knows his actions are reprehensible. He actively confesses to the raping of his wife. But his crime is absolved by a patriarchal logic of possession which he weaponizes as her husband to reframe his crime as retaliatory. That is, she failed to live up to the expectations of a wife, and by denying him unfiltered access to her body, he is justified to retaliate. 

Riddled with sexual violence, bodily harm and immense physical and psychological suffering, The Vegetarian is an exploration of the violence and the deterioration of women’s bodies under the double-weight of capitalist and patriarchal pressures. In fact, the female body has a particular focus in this novel. When Yeong-hye begins to starve herself, Mr Cheong observes her transformation with a discerning eye. ‘At first she’d slimmed down to the clean, sharp lines of a dancer’s physique,’ he says, ‘and I’d hoped things might stop there…’ But when she doesn’t and continues to fall deathly underweight, he remains blithely ignorant to the dangers of her condition deciding instead that ‘this situation has nothing to do with me.’ (p.17-18)

His cowardice is something to be thankful for, and following their divorce, she seems to be happier and healthier. But it also leaves her open to other men who wish to exploit her. In the second novelette, Mongolian Mark, when her brother-in-law uses her body as a canvas for his own artistic endeavours, he describes her as a body from which ‘all desire had been eliminated.’ (p.80) And yet, this hardly stops him from taking advantage of her, and soon he enacts his own fantasies upon her figure. Yeong-hye attempts to wrestle back control, but her attempt to gain autonomy over her own body presents itself as delirium, which in turn, leads to an increasingly violent intervention as the people in her life struggle to “normalise” her. 

Normality, then, becomes more of a question than a given, and the ways in which Yeong-hye’s body is exploited and penetrated by male authority figures doubles as a metaphor for the ways in which the novel grapples with madness. Like psychiatric patients, straight-jacketed and tranquilized, Yeong-hye’s body is manipulated by the men in her life to appear docile or “normal.” But with growing expectations pressed upon women to be a good wife—or maid, mother, cook, cleaner, sister, muse, sexual-gratifier and to be financially and independently successful, it is unsurprising that Yeong-hye goes completely mad. Who wouldn’t? 

Yet, to me, Yeong-hye’s madness seems to be more-or-less deliberate. Yeong-hye’s delirium is no simple glitch of the mind. No malaise or malfunction. Rather, she deliberately descends into a cocoon of delirium to protect herself.

This I found incredibly interesting. As an object of desire, she intentionally disfigures her own body, turning herself into a skeletal-like creature to be shunned in a psychiatric ward and away from preying hands, as an act of self-defence. She makes herself deliberately undesirable—mentally and physically—to assert some form of control over herself. But the problem, we learn, is not with the body itself. It is the idea of her body, commodified and possessed by others, which prevents her from ever gaining the autonomy she desires; and—even as a shell of a human—when her cocoon is shattered, and control continues to be wrestled from her grasp, she pushes herself to the absolute extremes to regain her autonomy.  

At this point I found the novel particularly difficult to read. The final novelette, Flaming Trees, is jarringly violent and Yeong-hye’s acts of self-harm become more and more sinister. Often, I was forced to put it down. But this struggle, I would argue, is much the point. 

The harm Yeong-hye enacts upon her own body is hardly different to that inflicted upon her by the men in her life: her husband rapes her; her brother-in-law chokes and objectifies her; her father beats her blind; and the doctor subdues her body through injections, force-feeding and straightjackets. Yet, when this violence is self-inflicted, it seems all the more unnatural. Why is it, then, that when a woman commits harm against herself that we are only then forced to question it? 

Han Kang neatly exposes the fallacy of this position. That when the men surrounding Yeong-hye commit violence against her, it is normalised by discourse. But the violence itself is unnatural, and the reactions provoked by Yeong-hye’s acts of self-harm only prove this. “Normality,” then, has a different twist to it, and the author plays witness to how blame and violence is used to maintain social norms—despite these norms proving to be harmful. Indeed, there are numerous occasions when the novel uses Yeong-hye’s delirium to reflect upon the label of insanity itself. When In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister, comes to visit her at the psychiatric hospital and witnesses a woman shrieking obscenities in the foyer, she observes how ‘blasé’ she has become to seeing the ‘mentally ill,’ and ‘after all these visits to the hospital, sometimes it’s the tranquil streets filled with so-called ‘normal’ people that end up seeming strange.’ (p.142)

Such strangeness is not without its own complications. Yeong-hye is not a loveable character. She causes nothing but disruption for the lives of those around her. She is sullen, stubborn, and sometimes stand-offish, but the commitment with which she upholds her inconvenience—completing her hour-long headstands, refusing to eat meat, and to the dismay of her husband, sporting her bare chest in public—begs the question: why does she behave in such a way? And what has prompted such a rapid transformation?

Importantly, we never hear the answer from Yeong-hye herself, and as her resistance becomes more sinister and her silence more obsolete, we watch as the character who surround her are forced—through immense violence and psychological contortions—to self-reflect and to consider the answer to these questions themselves. 

I will not spoil the conclusion. It is rather beautiful, if not dangerously, and perhaps a little too alluring. But I found it intriguing that the only figure who ever comes close to reaching Yeong-hye’s minds-eye is her sister. While the men in her life, namely, Mr Cheong and Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, seldom question her behaviour, (Mr Cheong simply ignores her, and while her brother-in-law probes a little—‘Why is it you don’t eat meat?’(p.90)—he is distracted by ‘the sexual images [of her] that were running in his head,’) it is her sister, another woman, trapped in the chains of social expectation, who finally crosses that unspeakable bridge. 

The Vegetarian is a haunting and disturbing read and, while it can often feel a little over-indulgent in it’s depiction of violence—teetering into trauma-porn—it is important, nonetheless; and its commentary on the ways in which women can be so casually treated like livestock prompts significant reflection upon the ways in which we treat others—human or otherwise. Not to be corny, but this novel is definitely something to chew on. 

JASMINE DARWIN is a Sydney/Eora based writer with a special interest in feminist writing, literary fiction, nature and ecology. She works as a bush regenerator and when not trampling through the bushland and swimming on the east coast, you’ll find her curled up with a book, a cuppa’ of earl grey and a pen and paper.

Two Hundred Million Musketeers

Ender Başkan

Giramondo

ISBN 9781923106482

Reviewed by BRIAN OBIRI-ASARE

One of the distinct pleasures of reading poetry is when the fluidities of sense awaken the senses of meaning. When poems reach for this sweet spot, when language is so taut, so refined, it’s able to suggest – even trigger – unknown resonances, they demand to be unpacked.

This demand, really an insistence, finds its root in curiosity. It seeks to answer the question of how sense coheres into meaning. It draws from all the muck and mystery of existence, from our memories, obligations, dreams, from our interactions with others, from listening, talking, empathising and disagreeing. At the same time, it also draws from the human’s background and beyond, from all the aspects of being, the noise constantly in our ears, memory, politics, the ghostly, subliminal messages from our Instagram reels, movies, computer games, those nightmares, the seductively simple propaganda manufacturing our desires, those reminders that there’s more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our human, all too human, philosophies.

In Australia, where the majority of us have ancestral ties to an elsewhere, any investigation into how sense coheres into meaning is further complicated by the works of poets who, both consciously and subconsciously, draw from a mix of cultural and environmental stimulus. Culturally and linguistically diverse, such poets often come at things from a distance, with one foot inside, with one foot outside, occupying an in/out space. Often their work leans into the disorientation this positioning entails. It’s also possible to find new expressions of poetic originality within this invigorating terrain.

Ender Başkan’s Two Hundred Million Musketeers is one such example. In this his debut collection, he offers an extended intercourse with the muck and mystery of existence in poems that blend lyric and narrative modes with a raconteur’s aplomb. Everyday events, their sprawling interiority, their surreal particularity, are often the focus. The frequent use of the first person imparts a consistent partiality to the collection. And yet somehow, someway, sitting with the poems remains alluring, especially if you’re the type who hungers for the resonances of sense and meaning that only poetry can provide.

Opening with a banger, ‘Here Is The Shirt, (Get) Off My Back / Swimming In The Afternoon’ sets the tone for everything that follows. An outpouring of chat, like listening to one of your homies riffing, it starts in the flux of domesticity:

if you want an alarm clock to work
make sure you place it out of reach
but never mind
our mutual friends are awake and so are we
549am
i am dad
im on demand
raaaah-biiiish truuuuuuuck!
i run out to see the bin flung up and over
with you
why is the driver wearing sunglasses?
even if you miss the first truck
you get 2 more chances
sometimes a hot air balloon
milk! daddy can you make me a milk?
you fill the bottle/ start the kettle/ grind the coffee
rumi said you make your own oil as you cook
and as a cooker I say lets cook
(p.1)

The act of making a morning coffee with his daughter is the springboard for the narrator of this poem to leap into the maze of memory’s multifaceted directions. Cherished father daughter time is canvassed. Voices, particularly those of the narrator’s children, are channeled and re-routed into a polyphony of soundbites. There’s steez aplenty. An insistent class-consciousness lurks, hyper-aware and never afraid to announce itself. One gets to witness a mind weighed with awareness as it grapples and engages with the world:

now plunged into an abyss of middle-aged
left-wing melancholia to be recognised by prowling hyper-caffeinated
re-financed class-ascendant former schoolmates lucky my kid
is an anarcho-terrorist anti-capitalist critical-theorist
and disarms their line of enquiry with logic
calls them poo-poo heads…
(p.4)

History is also woven into the poem, making it buzz with the unsettled questions about country, myth, and dispossession that, to this day, still haunt Australia. For example, one discovers that

in 1828 the masters and servants act was passed in australia
aiming to quash the nascent workers movement / put people in their
place / reinforce the imposition of stolen land / free labour and
continuing genocide.
(p.12)

The poems that follow are similarly propulsive, always in motion, staunch in their defence of a way of being and belonging with and for others. They are rooted in family, domesticity, work, friends, history and bask in the mutability of the English language. Readers are introduced to the narrator’s dede, his anneanne, his babaannes, and glean insights into a migrant’s world. Reading Turkish encyclopedias and shopping at a no frills supermarket at Westfield are presented as part of the Australian everyday.

‘Hot Water’ provides a telling example of the mechanics of how these poems work and what choices Başkan makes. It begins at a kitchen counter somewhere in Australia. The narrator is with Sophie, his partner, who’s telling a story. At the wrong moment, the narrator picks up a cup of scalding water, and this act turns into a memory of visiting a friend in Istanbul. This in turn leads the narrator to think about Muhsin Kut, a painter who wanted to be an architect but finds himself propelled to the antipodes in 1969

and locals say to him
you have no choice
youll make as much money as your willingness
to do the dirtiest most tiring work and
so mushsin walks into a Balmain soap factory
and they say
youre a painter!?
(p.37)

Riding the leitmotif of water, the poem goes on to harness a ‘psychic luna park of associations’ (p 48). There’s an internal playfulness as the narrator zigzags from Melbourne to Turkey and back again, boisterously leaning into a type of dislocation very familiar to a child of migrants. Threads are followed, abandoned, and sometimes reemerge. At the poem’s end, a satisfying taste of completion lingers.

Ender Başkan contains multitudes. He’s a father, son, partner, poet, bookseller, and a novelist. He’s the winner of the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Prize and was mentored by the late Ania Walwicz. His poetry emerges from within a tradition of migrant poets writing in the English language who tease and exploit the variations and politics of sound and speech. It is from within this wake that Two Hundred Million Musketeers engages in its act of poiesis – the bringing forth of new wholes and syntheses. It is both an experiment and an invitation to adventure. It demands care and attention on the part of readers to make meaning. With its slant truths and occasional dazzlements, it is a uniquely Australian testament of this thing we call life.

BRIAN OBIRI-ASARE is a writer working across poetry, prose, and drama. He is a recipient of the Northern Territory Literary Award for Poetry and has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. His recent poems have appeared in Westerly, Cordite, Southword and other spaces.

still back water

by Simeon Kronenberg,

Pitt Street Poetry

ISBN 978-1-922776-22-8

Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY

Laura (Riding) Jackson and Robert Graves counsel, in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, that a poem is an entity in itself and should be read as such. (1) So, too, a collection, presumably. While these counsels undoubtedly ring true for one level of reading, it is necessary to offend against them to take account of an oeuvre or to detect changes in style or central concerns. Simeon Kronenberg’s still black water, his second collections of pearlescent poetry, can be read satisfyingly  in the first way and differentially in the second as an extension or revision of his first collection, distance, given their overlapping themes (2). Perhaps eroticism is the only fascination that does not transition as strongly to the new collection, though love is all pervasive. In a sense Kronenberg has eschewed breadth for depth. I will write here solely of still black water.   

Section 1 of the collection, ‘Eclipse’, written mostly in couplets and triplets, has the feel of  journeys revisited, of place as exemplified in the poems ‘Darlinghurst, 11pm Friday 27 March 2020’ and ‘Castlemaine, March 2023’, and of lives, the friends he memorialises (‘Diagnosis’, ‘Passing’, ‘Funeral’) and his own, with rural concerns replacing his citified adult past and hints that this frames a return to origins, although this be over-reading the persona in ‘Regulator, For “Benjamin Dodds’–“I too wish to return/ to my country// of rained on hills/ under cumulus skies”. Death is ever present–“I think about death/ most days now” (‘Most days’)–suggesting its cold hand has brushed the poet’s own shoulder through a medical crisis or something equivalent. There is both sadness and affection in remembering his friends:

The poems in this section are reflective, indeed wistful, and evocative, with the pithiness and resort to nature that typify the historic Chinese and Japanese poets Kronenberg obviously takes delight in – “I think about the wind in trees// as the old Chinese poet did/ a thousand years ago// in the rambler’s hut/ as he listened to the pine trees” (‘Wind, For Debbie Bird Rose’ ).

Kronenberg has eyes for family through the ‘Window’ of Section 2, a natural concomitant of mood, where forms are more expansive among the now expected short lines, couplets and triplets. He sees his father’s face in the mirror in the eponymous poem and recalls him fondly tending the hearth in ‘Ash’ and with rage in ‘Still’, although these latter memories amount to “nothing”. The affection for his mother is unequivocal, though, in ‘Fog’, he concedes perhaps a child’s ignorance of the whole person as he peers into a starlit night:

What do I know
of my mother?
A migratory light
in the dark
and a deep fog
that came after–
and like a too heavy
quilt it remained. 
(p.32)

She features in five poems and her suffering, from depression or melancholia perhaps, and relatively early death hang over the poet, “finally spent, like a moth/ banged on to windscreen glass” (‘Haze’). Kronenberg stretches beyond his parents to his grandparents to their homelands and larger ancestry. His siblings are collectivised into “us” and “the children’ and these memories bring back the thought of his own death, “Someone told me/ he was surprised/ I was still alive // …//…-and know/ really know/ I’m coming up to death” (’Might as well name it’). There is a certain sadness ladling through these reminiscences but it does not tip over into maudlinism or a bewailing self.

The shortest section, ‘Self’, follows and it is almost exclusively set in Bali, a spiritual and artistic sanctuary for the poet, perhaps occasioned by its exoticism and reinforced by having met his partner there. Both inhabit ‘Music’ and ‘Sanur, Bali. April 2022’:

Death intervenes even here (“the sudden apprehension/ of my death”, ‘Music’), but the context suggests more a revenant than a presiding spirit. The other incursion is the need and will to write and they inform the “promise” he makes in ’It’s not as if’ “to inhabit my life,/ to understand//the yawn/and ache of it.” 

Kronenberg loves the arts and the final section, ‘Tracks’, acknowledges and indulges his inspirations. This is the longest section in the collection and the arts seem as much home for him as place. Poets and writers predominate, in harmony with “I’ve never wanted more/ than to write” in ‘It’s not as if’ in the previous section. Despite this he can treat books roughly–“I first break/ their spines–// … By breaking backs/ I release them–// and me” ( ‘Books’). He uses Charles Simic to underline the attempted reconciliations of the previous sections–“I’m more at ease/ with the past/ than I’ve been// as I write/ it’s up ahead/ in clear sight” (‘Past, After Charles Simic’)–and  Dick Davis to acknowledge “that awful fact/ means I’m inclined to dwell/ on the bad unfinished business// of my mother’s death/ … // … And still, I write her into poems” (‘Coda, After Dick Davis’). Simic features three times. Adam Zagajewski, Ted Hughes and Anthony Lawrence twice. The poems riffed from Allen Ginsberg, Constantine Cavafy and Bruce Gardiner point to a gay heritage that Kronenberg prizes.  

While still black water is infused with reflections on mortality, it is not, as noted earlier, weighed down by them; it is, in fact, buoyed by them. The arts and love elevate life and Kronenberg is an enthusiastic participant in both and his collection fulfils its final lines, “this (perhaps not always) invented life/ in poetry where the mystery/ is all that’s revealed”.

Notes

1. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927; reprint, Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1971). This counsel partly inspired the so-called close reading of a poem associated with the “New Criticism” movement of William Empson et al.
2. Simeon Kronenberg, still black water (Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2026); Simeon Kronenberg, distance (Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2018).
 
PAUL SCULLY is a Sydney-based poet with four published collections, the latest being The Literary Detective and Other Crimes published by Bonfire Press in 2025. He holds a Doctor of Arts from Sydney University. His work has been commended and shortlisted in major Australian poetry prizes and published in print and online journals in Australia, Ireland, the UK and USA. His website is http://paulscullypoet.com.au/.

An Onslaught of Light

Natasha Rai

Pantera Press

ISBN 9780648619093

Reviewed by NINA CULLEY

Natasha Rai’s debut novel An Onslaught of Light opens with Archana, or “Arch” as she is known, stepping onto Sydney’s tarmac, breathing in the damp heat. It’s immediately clear that avoidance is her go-to: she declines a call from her brother, Sunny, pushes away a thought of her Amma, and flees almost immediately to the mountains. She’s running from something, though Rai doesn’t name it outright. Much of the novel is shaped by this sense of distance – not only Arch’s, but her family’s collective inclination to shut out hard truths. As Rai makes clear, however, unresolved trauma rarely stays buried. It seeps, quietly and indomitably, into the present.

Rai’s story unfolds through alternating perspectives – Arch in the present, and her parents, Indu and Vijay, in the past – moving between post-COVID Australia and earlier decades beginning in India in the early 1970s. When we first encounter Arch, now in her late thirties or early forties, she’s living the life of a recluse. Despite her best efforts to remain removed, she is drawn back into her family orbit through Sunny, the youngest child and the family’s gentle mediator. Where Arch is volatile and textbook avoidant – time and again choosing to “push [her emotions] deep inside her, down into the swamp with all the other miseries buried in the depths of her core” (p.269) – Sunny is steady, less burdened by trauma.

The novel then moves backward, first to Indu and Vijay as newlyweds in India, and later to the family’s migration to Australia in the 1980s and 90s, where Rai situates their struggles within a distinctly hostile cultural moment. For migrant families, this was a period of immigration panic, heightened pressure to assimilate, both casual and overt racism, coinciding with the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and a broader absence of institutional language or cultural literacy. Emotional suffering definitely existed, but it was rarely articulated; instead, silence, distraction, and endurance were mistaken for resilience.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the family finds the adjustment disorientating. Arch is bullied at school; Indu, grieving her mother and newly estranged from her father, is lonely and unmoored; and Vijay, once a successful architect in India, is forced to start over, working in a laundromat while proudly clinging to his culture through the Indian Association – people who “understand what they have lost and what they continue to lose” (p.114). His frustration often turns into anger and violence toward Arch and, on one occasion, Indu. A devastating loss compounds these tensions, leaving the family fractured and haunted way into the present.

Neither timeline outshines the other. Rai structures the novel so that the past clarifies the emotional logic of the present, while the present becomes a space of reckoning – caught between running and confronting, old patterns and growth. Nowhere is this more affecting than in Vijay’s present-day arc where he’s diminished, reflective, and increasingly fragile, building shrines and seeking atonement for his younger self. His mental health struggles form a small but insistent part of the novel, echoing Indu’s depression, which in the early 1990s was barely understood. Within the context of migration, this feels especially apt: research shows diasporic populations experience high of untreated depression and anxiety, exacerbated by isolation, cultural stigma, and systemic barriers to care. By giving voice to Arch’s parents, Rai invites empathy and nuance without excusing any of the harm.

Arch, too, is shaped by contradiction, a complexity that surfaces most clearly in her discomfort with her own heritage. As a child, she distances herself from her Indianness, embarrassed by her saree-wearing mother, anxious that her clothes smell of curry, and desperate to pass by unnoticed. Later, she insists she is unlike “other Indians,” (p.252) listing temples, rituals, and traditions with both disdain and shame, admitting that being Indian makes her feel ugly. In this, Rai places Arch within a familiar lineage of diaspora protagonists for whom assimilation often demands a painful level of self-erasure.

Arch’s alienation is further complicated by her queerness. As a teenager, she understands her sexuality as inseparable from her Indianness, assuming her family wouldn’t be accepting. Even as an adult, intimacy remains fraught: she avoids defining her relationship with Emma, a singer she meets later in the novel, and remains intensely sensitive about her own sense of belonging and otherness, becoming angry, for example, when Emma asks about her cultural heritage. “I sound like you, I dress like you, but it’s not enough. I have to explain why I look like this. Different,” (p.218) she snaps.

*

As well as the novel’s engagement with Indian traditions and food, An Onslaught of Light features a distinctly dreary Australianness. There’re beers in shrubby backyards, drinks on the water, suggestions of hitting the RSL, beach swims and silky summer days. Suburban inertia is thickly coated as characters watch David Attenborough on the couch or eat doughy pizza at a new restaurant in town.

This slowness may frustrate readers searching for dramatic climaxes, but it’s also what makes the novel so convincing. Rai’s pacing is deliberate and wise, moving across decades to reflect the reality that sadly there’re no quick fixes for anger or trauma – only community, small and imperfect acts of care, and a lot of time. It’s a realisation that Arch finally registers as she watches her niece Zoe navigate racism with a vocabulary she herself never had, allowing her to see, at once, how much has changed and all that persists.

NINA CULLEY is a Thai-Welsh writer and critic based in Naarm. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Aniko Press, Mascara Review, and more. As a theatre, arts, and literary critic, her work is regularly published in Time Out, Limelight, and ArtsHub. In 2024, she was named one of Mascara Review’s Emerging Critics. She previously worked as Editorial Assistant at Kill Your Darlings.

How to Dodge Flying Sandals 

Daniel Nour

Simon & Schuster

ISBN 9781923046573

Reviewed by THUY ON

There is a trajectory that is followed by most memoirists: the incremental build-up of many unhappy happenstances that lead to the peak of anguish and an epiphany of sorts before lessons are duly learned and a hard-won resolution is granted. The term ‘misery memoir’ is pejorative, but there’s a nub of truth in such a description: many authors do wallow in the mire, particularly of other people’s making, and many memoirs seem to be commissioned largely because of the hardships suffered and the resilience shown by the narrator, ultimately leading to some kind of rosy outcome that champions survival over victimhood.

We all know how these memoirs usually go. Whatever the background of the protagonist, there is trauma underpinning their stories; trauma is used as a foundational linchpin that holds the narrative together. An earnest tone will also carry the heavy weight of the book from beginning to end, with gravitas favoured over levity.

However, Daniel Nour’s How to Dodge Flying Sandals and Other Advice for Life playfully subverts the standard memoir in several ways. This debut book deals with the double whammy of identity crises: the trials of being a child of Eygptian immigrants in Western Sydney and of being queer. Individually, each and either subset of circumstances are likely to create more than a twinge of discomfort for a young adult testing out the parameters of selfhood, but combined, their twin challenges can cause great volatility and uncertainty to a sensitive teenager. How Nour navigates both is the subject of the book.

In some ways he dramatises the usual tropes of an ethnic memoir; the expected checklist is acknowledged and honoured: the uneasy straddling between cultures, the generational gap that causes confusion and rebellion, the push and pull of conformity and independence. But the most distinctive way that Sandals differs from other memoirs is that it uses humour as a coping mechanism and as a way to diffuse tension.

The first clue that this book is atypical is in the title. It’s not written in chronological order but in the way of self-help guides. Every chapter is titled “How to….” (for instance, Succeed Academically, Become a Father, Date Men, Survive a Global Pandemic). Each milestone is filtered through Nour’s own experiences and there’s a stand-up comic’s lightness of touch and impeccable timing that informs each section. The second clue is that Nour’s author notes point out that he has taken some “liberties”. It’s a gentle admission perhaps that some of the set pieces within the book have been amplified and tweaked for comedic purposes, and hence we’re looking at an unreliable narrator here rather than someone committed to scrupulous truth-telling.

How to Dodge Flying Sandals is like a collection of short stories, episodic in style, and together these snapshots aim for an emotional truth about growing up in an Egyptian-Australian household as a person of faith (Coptic Catholic) while coming to terms with your sexuality. Told in a series of standalone vignettes, the structure allows Nour to use flashbacks and move back and forth in time, which means that the chapters can feel disjointed, but they also allow you to dip in and out of the book (like rifling through an anthology of tales) rather than have to read from beginning to end.

Interestingly enough, there is no chapter devoted to the title instructive, How to Dodge Flying Sandals. It stands as an overall metaphor for the memoir itself, insofar as among the raft of challenges faced by young Arabs, Nour explores various ways of dodging cultural and gender stereotypes as well as religious guilt and parental expectations.

From the very first chapter, “How to Die”, we’re introduced to a motley crew of extended relatives at the funeral of Nour’s grandfather, Gidoo. The scene is chaotic, with grieving and garrulous members arguing about death proprieties, money owed and inheritance promises all at the same time. Already we can see Nour’s knack for characterisation and dialogue (Sandals can easily be transferred into an audio book for a bonus suite of accents).

Family dynamics aside, the author’s self-exploration continues throughout the book, with several chapters showing how his nascent sexuality is routinely quashed by everyday homophobia. Here he is, in all his childish innocence and early gay sensibilities, wondering what he will do when he grows up, asking his mother (who quickly shuts the question down), “What if I don’t want to get married but travel everywhere and tell big speeches on stage in a dress? And I’ll have my friends Steve and Jeremy with me and kiss them.” (p.11) His father is more direct when five-year-old Nour wears a pink chiffon dress and is duly told, “Habibi, only girls wear dresses … You’re my big man, my big boy so I need you to act like a man, not a faffy.” (p.130)

Yet, regardless of how they feel about his queerness, the love and support of his parents are shown to be unconditional. Even when they can’t attend his high school graduation, they take photos of Nour, and “Their faces are shining with happiness like a feast is laid out for the whole family” (p.71). At another point, his father reassures him, “You should never feel embarrassed about who you are, habibi.” (p.28)

Such fraught internal discussions of who he is versus who he should be is coupled with the young Nour’s body shame (fears of being called ‘Bitch-tits” at school swimming makes him cringe about undressing in the boys’ change rooms) and worries about societal prejudices of his background (“If you tell people you’re Egyptian they’ll say you’re a terrorist and beat you up,” (p.31) cautions his older sister Rita). It’s a credit to Nour that despite contentious subjects around sex and race, there is still a seam of humour that runs through even the most overwrought situations. This is because he often laughs at himself and generously invites us to laugh alongside him.

His vulnerabilities and follies are exposed so we can better understand and empathise with his rocky passage to adulthood, a path paved with self-hate, bullying, peer group pressure and hypocrisy. It’s this willingness to own up to his confusion that makes How to Dodge Flying Sandals engaging and emotionally honest. We witness him being so deep in the closet he’ll criticise same-sex marriage on national television in a show called Christians Today (“How to Be a Big TV Star”). The gay awakening was still yet to surface.

The beauty is in the details, and the book is studded with close observations. Like how, while his father is at work in a newsagency (4am starts, 9pm home time), Nour’s weekday substitute is Sesame Street’s The Count, “his accent and massive Arab-looking nose is strangely comforting.” (p.11)

Though the bulk of the book concentrates on his childhood and adolescence, How to Dodge Flying Sandals also documents the first steps of Nour’s fledgling career in words (“How to Break News”.) He was previously awarded the NSW Premier’s Young Journalism Award by Multicultural NSW. That Nour also dabbles in improv comedy explains the humour in the memoir.

Instead of simply recounting events and incidences, the tales in How to Dodge Flying Sandals are crafted in such a way that it utilises all the skillset of a fiction writer, with plot, dialogue and characterisation carefully considered. The only difference is that Nour uses his own life as material to enable you to step into his sandals. The result is the antithesis to the “misery memoir”. It’s a book that may tread familiar grounds in terms of the struggle for self-acceptance despite myriad pressures, but it captures all the awkwardness, stresses and triumphs of a young Arab queer man growing up in Australia and does so not with hand-wringing angst, but with laughter in every chapter.

THUY ON is an arts journalist, editor, critic and poet. She’s the author of three poetry collections, all published by UWAP: Turbulence (2020), Decadence (2022) and Essence (2025). Thuy’s currently working on her fourth book, and yes, its title will rhyme with the previous books!

these memories require 

Jacinta Le Plastrier

Puncher & Wattmann

ISBN: 9781923099661

Reviewed by PARIS ROSEMONT
 

Jacinta Le Plastrier’s these memories require is a delicately woven poetry collection blending emotion and intellect whilst pressing on the bruises of trauma and memory. It traverses complex terrain, from lived experience to the ethically observed, through to remnants of the historical as well as collective ancestral memory. That’s a lot of suffering to pack into one collection. For the most part, Le Plastrier is adept at treading with just the right amount of balance, a tightrope walker poised on the edge of each carefully curated word. Control over craft is evident in the precision of expression in stark contrast to a sense of powerlessness careening through the traumatic subject-matter itself. The imagery displays dualities wedding beauty with brutality, forming ‘Scabs, hard as rubies’ (‘untitled (o,)’ p9). 

There is much that is left teasingly unsaid in this gripping collection. From the very title these memories require, pseudo-cliffhangers challenge the reader to ponder, to reflect, to fill in the blanks, to (attempt to) complete. As the mise en abyme of nested doorways within doorways on the cover suggests, this book asks as many questions as it answers. The unresolved give the poems a tension that propel the reader into digging curiously into the warren of intrigue and discovery.

notbirthhouse…in phantasm’s shadows. / and you are nearly / always like a child, / both within yourself, and yet / with your own gaze, / you are able / to watch you. / nightgown dressed, / you float, spectral / through its doors, / across thresholds…it was the house / that taught you / how to write.

(‘returnings’ pp2-3; original layout not retained)

There’s a sense of otherworldliness about this collection, grounded in both the real and surreal. 

i am not talking of the wall’s scream, how it screamed
        so whitely,
… i wanted to climb
        the rubble,

hold a single stone.
let its weight convince me,
        my eye was a hand
(‘construction site’ p4)

The poems themselves are curious beasts, each ‘untitled’ accompanied by a qualifier in parentheses: ‘untitled (later)’, ‘untitled (perhaps)’, ‘untitled (i want)’, ‘untitled (did i)’, ‘untitled (ahoy)’. The brevity of these descriptions gives them a minimalist feel—enigmatic whilst drilling directly into the core of the text. There’s an almost childlike simplicity to these parenthetical (sub)titles—they’re direct, lacking pretension or waffle. This echoes recurring themes that thread their way like an umbilical cord throughout this collection: childhood and conversely, motherhood. 

Le Plastrier paints striking portraits of motherhood in its tender shades of complexity and nuance:

…each pregnancy entombed, an oxblood cave of dream, ribbed
by maternal drum, venal, aortal, pulse threaded to origin’s sorcery.
(‘quartet (for s.)’ p19)

From complicated labours:
born unbreathing blue
yanked you

to touch you
only through

glassy slits,
you gloved gravely

into incubator

to the witnessing of heart-wrenching loss later in the same poem:

1. dies in the glasscot
   exactly next to you,
   her parents’ grief
   at 3 am, at the royal women’s hospital, total.
   (‘icu (for b.)’ pp15-16)

The poet does not spare the reader the gore of motherhood: ‘the surgeon. his hands at your skull / juggling the entrails / of all memory’ (‘neuroward2east (for a.b.)’ p21). Motherhood can be brutal business. Add to the mix the livewire of neurodivergence and the challenge of raising a child with special needs, and the complexities are compounded. From social judgement to a revolving door of medical appointments (‘the scour of years of speech pathology / by which you reformed your sounds’):

Who is getting it wrong?
you, dear first child
or the specialists helpful with their rules.
… i almost failed you,
almost let-in their slurs
which whispered–chronically,
underlit like radium your sleeping.
(‘quartet (for s.)’ pp17-18)

One poem proffers a disturbingly hacked doll where short, choppy lines mirror blunt butchery:

…you savage her
with scissors,
…break
both plastic arms;
abandon her
in the field
right next
to your home’
(‘untitled (dolls)’ p7)

It is not only the dolls that suffer. In the recounted memories, childhood is fraught with myriad hurts, which collectively form ‘The small frond of a scar from childhood’s kneecap’ (‘By which you mean,’ p10). But for all their growing pains, bittersweet is the inevitable shift beyond childhood:

…later,
the children will quieten,
and the clear silence culled
from the feet of their laughter
…dolls vagrant,
their clotted hair.
…unicorns…
exiled by reason
(‘untitled (later)’ p11)

these memories require is composed of two parts. The collection starts strong with powerful sparseness and visceral intimacy. There is a distinct shift in style and tone with the penultimate poem in this part—not one of the multiple ‘untitled’ pieces, but instead, the singular ‘unnamed’. The shorter, fragmented lines of the preceding poems give way to almost a dozen paragraphs of prose. It seems an unusual stylistic choice to have placed this particular poem on the Part I side of the divide. With the shift from the micro of the intensely personal to the macro of things more cosmic and universal, the lofty voice of the observer begins to veer into the histrionic. The words now float unmoored in another plane. Le Plastrier writes ‘your guide will appear, usually these are of celestial form’. There is talk of ‘an assassin assigned by the negative realms’ who may try to take us ‘far beyond this fortress’s limits’. The poem is littered with references to ‘the constellation of their unearthly blood’ and ‘half-mortal(s)’ that are apparently not ‘druidic’. The language employed feels anachronistic and alienating in its didactic grandeur:

so i wore a triple-horned crown, hewn from the sycamore tree we consider sacred…i buried a staff made of crystal, before we departed. in its symbols, inscribed, are embedded all the seed-lights of our future, the old skills we will need to remember. the geographic co-ordinates of its hidden site are related to the henge, the room, and the sycamore–tattooed into my earthly and lighter minds. would that I could trust any of you with this information?

(‘unnamed’ pp22-23)

This voice adopted creates an omnipotent ‘I’ (the writer) versus ‘you’ (the reader). Thus held at arm’s length, the reader feels a sense of disconnect. The bio at the back of the book reveals the poet has a personal interest in the supernatural. The swerve into this terrain makes more sense within this context. However, for readers who may not share this niche fascination, the phantasmal departure can feel estranging—particularly after the relatable human heartbeat of the poems preceding it.

Part II is more disjointed in style and theme than the first (not a criticism; merely an observation). Continuing with supernatural elements, there are poems featuring ‘witchly’ beings and ‘runes (that) do not lie’ (‘untitled (witchly)’ p28 and ‘untitled (did i)’ p31) and ekphrastic pieces engaging in poetic discourse with literary and philosophical giants including Lorca (‘untitled (recovery)’ pp32-33), Brecht (‘untitled (On)’ pp34-35), and Avery F. Gordon (‘untitled (pacing)’ pp50-51), the latter containing a quote longer than the poem itself. The footnotes leave no doubt the poet is widely read, has closely studied the source material, and does not invoke these predecessors lightly. 

Poems on current affairs include the devastating:

& across twenty-four hours

of newsprint
the platelets of children
will be sailing

on a Gazan beach.
(‘untitled (the earth lugs on)’ p36)

A couple of poems later, we reach vertically aligned prose poem ‘the storm’, decadently spread across two pages. This piece embraces the sumptuousness of language, each word carefully deployed. Interesting turns of phrase, charming images, and unique pairings within compound words delight: 

…Empire furniture huddled like gilded fowl…musselsoftness of a woman’s innermost rising…fossils small as postage-stamps…upon my cheek I can feel their bloodwarmth…just beyond the windoworiel, powdering the wordkeep…the ding of fancy cars fishtailing, their dollardrum inhabitants…straightasadie ribbons of light…the storm’s settled its wager of rain and cloudedbright…

(‘the storm’ pp 40-41)

A stylistic rupture confronts us in the frenetic stream-of-consciousness piece that follows, where the poet confesses:

all i want to do
tonight, is to be too fucked up
        … this poem’s getting all smashed up

(‘untitled (ahoy)’ p42)

The latter quarter of this collection explores poetry of witness. The reader is taken into unsettling territory charting abuse, madness, and destructiveness of various kinds, where desperate coping mechanisms themselves become a form of self-abuse. 

‘Catalogue’ (pp47-49) is starkly powerful. A blackout poem chilling in the sparseness of text. It is a twenty-one-word poem spanning three whole pages comprised largely of ominous slabs of visually striking redactions. The naked vulnerability of what remains is made even more gut-wrenching juxtaposed with the guesswork behind what has been obscured.

The final poems in Le Plastrier’s collection return once again to childhood. From the ‘numinous hours…at the foot of your child bed’ (‘untitled (nascent)’ p54) to ‘a child / without questions’ (‘in the sea’s’ p55). The closing poem gently gives the reader permission to ‘go backwards / with all your hours’ (‘untitled (long)’ p56), a purging of sorts of the preceding violence. We return to the safety and comfort of the womb—on a physiological, psychological, and mother-earth level. It is welcome relief and a soft landing after the volatile ride through motherhood, brutality, philosophy, and the corporeal. these memories require is a viscerally wrought collection crafted with great skill and care, showcasing the bruising gradients of life through personal and collective memory. Yet for all the horrors both experienced and witnessed, there’s a pervading sense of beauty and hope. As Le Plastrier writes in ‘untitled (the earth lugs on)’ (p36): ‘we revolve / on the delicate ankles of love’.

PARIS ROSEMONT is a multi-award-winning Thai Australian poet, performer, educator, and author of Banana Girl (2023) and Barefoot Poetess (2025). Her books have received awards and accolades in Australia, Greece, UK and USA. Paris’s poetry has been published in a plethora of literary journals and anthologies including Australian Poetry Journal, FemAsia Magazine, Rabbit, Splinter, and Verge. She was the winner of the Matthew Rocca Poetry Prize 2025 (Verandah Literary Journal; an initiative of Deakin University), First Prize in the Hammond House Publishing Origins Poetry Prize 2023 (UK), received a Best of the Net 2025 nomination from Sky Island Journal, and was awarded Honourable Mention in the Fish Poetry Prize 2025 (Top 10 in the world, as selected by judge Billy Collins). She has judged for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards 2025 and Sydney Fringe Festival 2024. Paris is a member of the Randwick City Council Arts & Cultural Advisory Committee, Guest Editor for Written Off Literary Journal, and sits on the Hunter Writers’ Centre Board. She may be found at www.parisrosemont.com

Salsa in the Suburbs

by Alejandra Martinez

ISBN 9781923099630

Puncher and Wattmann

Reviewed by ALISON STODDART

Immigration has always been a topic on the Australian socio-political agenda.  A talking point that affects all members of our multicultural society and can be heard everywhere, from offices to cafes, gyms to hairdressers. There is no doubt that it is currently on the agenda again, brought to the foreground by Pauline Hanson’s divisive antics in parliament and the rise of anti-immigration rallies.  One unfortunate aspect of this debate is the simplistic way it has come to be presented in the media. Going some way to revealing the cultural nuance that permeates every aspect of the immigration process, Salsa in the Suburbs is the story of Juan, a Uruguayan who brought his wife and three young daughters to Australia in the 1970’s to escape a military dictatorship. 

The novel is set in the suburbs of Western Sydney, a setting that immediately places the theme of migration and multiculturalism at the centre of the story. And enticingly, the topic of an older generation entering the dating world sets up a storyline that is both tender and humorous.

Juan is a recently bereaved widower in his seventies, in mourning and relying on his daughters, who all reflect varying ties to their heritage. His middle daughter Lola is married to Leo, a fellow Uruguayan and together they have two boys.  It is Lola who takes on the role of carer and protector of Juan and the one who clings most to her Uruguayan roots. A trained scientist who opts out to work in a supermarket, she struggles with mental illness and finds it hard to reconcile the life she has to the one she envisioned for herself.

Her older sister Betty, an ex-nurse, has turned her back on the burden of her family and has chosen to take her Australian husband and three Australian-born children to live an alternate life in Mullumbimby, making soaps and candles and experimenting with herbal medicine. She is living in alignment with her values, or so she thinks, but Betty has the conundrum of knowing that her heritage is running through her veins when she discovers that her grandmother too, was a healer.

The third daughter Malena is a thinly drawn character who has fled the Australia embraced by the rest of her family and lives in Italy with her Italian husband. Does she perhaps question her place in the land where her parents chose to settle, and is her fleeing to Italy a way of settling the dissonance in her mind of having to choose between her cultural heritage and her upbringing? 

The novel is divided by chapters utilising the narrative technique of internal focalisation whereby a chapter is narrated by a single character. The chapters are prefaced by poetry (Juan), journal entries (Lola) and soap recipes (Betty). These become clues to each character’s state of mind and nicely segue into the actual narrative. We are privy to Lola’s scribbling in her diary, reflecting her increasingly erratic state of mine, and Betty’s distancing from the world around her by entering into the soothing world of soap and yoga. Betty eases the tension of attending the funeral of a beloved aunt by making Lemon Balm soap, but we only know this from the recipe at the start of the chapter.

Juan, the patriarch of the family, is a complex character. He knows all the words to Carlos Gardel songs, a composer, singer and prominent figure in the history of tango. It is unsure if Juan reveres Carlos Gardel because he was a fellow exile, with Gardel being born in France – but unable to return took on the nationality of Uruguay, or because he simply loved the music of Tango that Gardel composed and sang.  Probably a mix of both.

Missing his beloved wife Carmen, he nevertheless cannot help comparing her unwillingness to assimilate into Australian society with his own embracing of life in Australia. Carmen never felt at home in Australia and always looked to the future when she and Juan could return to their ‘real’ home. Whereas Juan recognises the opportunities that Australia lays at his children’s feet and the fact that they would never ‘go home’ with him and Carmen. He muses upon this very aspect. “For Carmen the pull of her roots had been stronger than the pull of her children. Not for me, I wanted to be closer to my daughters” (page 105). 

Juan is devoted to family but finds it hard to assimilate the changing role of men in society. He loves his three daughters but it’s his first-born grandchild, a boy, whom he dotes on.  Juan has a streak of culturally inherited misogyny, and his respect is kept for the men in his family, his grandsons and his sons-in-law, particularly the blue-collar one.  His son-in-law Chris who built his own house “brick by brick” is clearly admired over and above Malena’s husband, a university educated lawyer with multiple degrees.  “He doesn’t need to fix anything”, contemplates Juan to himself when thinking about his daughter’s husbands. “He pays tradesmen to do it”.

It is Juan who retains the romance and innocence of his youth.  Aging as he is, he never loses his belief in love and remains open to it in any form.  Whether from his beloved labrador Coco or from an ad placed in the newspaper searching for a lady “to share conversations and outings with” (page 1). 

Juan’s story takes a right hand turn when, without the help of the newspaper advertisement, he meets a widowed aboriginal woman at his local park when they are both walking their dogs. Their clashing of cultures is not much subtly highlighted but glaringly obvious with the woman’s attempt at understanding Juan’s pronunciation of his name. “Hooarn” she finally manages after mimicking his accent.

Ultimately though this is the most complex character in Salsa. Her name is Frances, and Juan is initially repelled by her, but comes to understand her and in turn, to love her. Upon first meeting Frances, Juan thinks she is crazy. “You are very rude, the woman tells me. I’m not rude, you are a stupid woman that cannot control her little dog” (page 57).

Martinez brings aspects of intersectionality to the novel through Frances and creates a relationship between her and Juan that is believable and deeply touching. Although their growing love affair puts a strain on the family as the family reassess all that they know about cultural belonging and generational change. 

Given the deeply troubled history of political representation, national recognition, the contexts of incarceration rates and more, it is difficult to write an Indigenous character without inflicting settler-colonial assumptions. Martinez brushes lightly over her story. The novel could explore the immigrant and Indigenous persons’ relationship as a way forward, based on a deeper understanding of the violence of dispossession. If an author is going to bring up these themes in 2025, they must handle them in culturally safe and appropriate ways. Frances’ story of her mother being part of the stolen generation is simplistically touched on and feels like a mere gesture. Other references to Indigenous culture and activism, such as the Freedom Ride of 1965, are fleetingly mentioned. There is minimal engagement on the theme of Aboriginal dispossession. It does, therefore, feel like this character is tokenising the Aboriginal presence, the author using Frances’ heritage merely to explain the unity that springs up between her and Juan, both being from violent and unsettled nations. 

Martinez writes in a straightforward way.  She engages in a lot of dialogue which mostly feels authentic but every now and then the tone of her characters shift.  There is a discrepancy between Juan’s inner monologue and his spoken word, which can be jarring. 

The novel is ripe with rituals of food, traditions and family. Spanish words like the South American herbal coffee equivalent ‘mate’ and social gatherings, ‘asado’s’ pepper the narrative.

Salsa in the Suburbs is the story of a migrant journey on unceded and unsettled land. It explores the collective confusion that the children of these migrants feel as they straddle two cultures. It is an exploration of immigration and all its inherent obstacles encountered by migrant people, including the internalised racism that simmers beneath benign white Australian of the 1970’s. 

An overarching theme of the novel raises the questions of where does a person feel most at home?  Is it in their culture or in their geographical location?  Where does one get a sense of place? It is also a story that explores the experience of exile and migration across time with the interesting alternative perspective from another culture, one that is over 60,000 years old and displaced in its own land. It covers a myriad of themes that include mental health, ageing and identity.

Martinez is a Blue Mountains, New South Wales based writer who migrated to Australia at the age of seven to escape political turmoil in Uruguay. She was the winner of the 2022 Newcastle Writers Festival Fresh Ink Emerging Writer Prize, which went on to be developed into this novel. She has produced a sweetly told story of a migrant family, ultimately an Australian family and what that entails. It is an engaging example of inclusive fiction with diverse character representations.
 
ALISON STODART is a country born and bred, Sydney writer who holds a Master’s degree at Macquarie University in Creative Writing. X @a_hatz5

Joss: A History

Grace Yee

Giramondo

ISBN:9781923106314

Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON

Grace Yee’s Joss: A History challenges contemporary poetry readers with the unspoken premise ‘How far can we deconstruct history to examine and understand it?’ Yee’s Joss takes up the mantle of a documentary poet (docu-poet) such as Pasiley Rekdal, who in West: A Translation scrutinises the legacy of Chinese labour in the American West that helped construct the great railroads, using and responding to historical documents and traces of Chinese culture. In
Joss, Yee reviews the impact of Chinese workers in the goldfields of Victoria, New South Wales and Aotearoa inspired by the unmarked and segregated graves of over a thousand ‘Chinamen’ she discovered scattered across White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo. Yee uses the tools of documentary poetry throughout Joss which Jospeh Harrington writes traverses and crosses boundaries “in the sense that it decreases the distance between writing history and poetry, while experimenting with the received forms of both.” This new collection builds upon Yee’s work in the triple award-winning Chinese Fish yet differs in the ways it interrogates and re-narrativises history and Chinese settler experiences through docu-poetry techniques. Somewhat more fragmented and ambitious in scope, as Yee writes, “They sutured these documents”, the poet employs fragmented, pastiched lines and surrealist techniques to highlight the unique experiences of Chinese settlers, the absurdity of racial discrimination and how the struggles and cultural nuances of migrant minorities in Australia are ultimately subsumed, fragmented and erased by the White Australia narrative.

A ‘joss’ is a physical statue in Chinese deity worship. In Chinese tradition the statue is not viewed as a simple representation of the deity but contains the actual spirit of the deity, which serves as an apt metaphor for Yee’s collection. These poems are not representations of Chinese people across the goldfields, rather an attempt to embody the spirit of these ancestors within each poem. In a poem such as “best quality vegetables” Yee utilises the finest properties of her work, with a bio-poem that uplifts her ironically named character “bound feet lily flower” while also leaning into her critique of Australian culture: “we don’t go / to the theatre, dance halls or picture shows, because this is / the time of the larrikins and my life is a silent feature film.”  The word “larrikin” is ironically repeated throughout the collection. From a term that originally meant “hoodlum,” larrikin has evolved into an affectionate “Ocker” term that bears interrogation, for one era’s or group’s larrikin is another’s murderer. As Yee explicates in the prose poem that combines several assaults and the failures of the justice system into one poem, “Playful Bodily Harm,” with the “Death Result of Unmistakeable Larrikin Assault on any Chinaman.” The evocative “my father was not a gardener” asks the reader to see the Chinese gardener as greater than the role he inhabits of immigrant labourer, and rather as someone who “rode out to orion’s belt in his sherlock hat” yet lived a life of quiet tolerance as “every night he out-walked the doughnut boys fuckin’ asians out.” These contrasts typify the moments in the poems in Joss, fragments of beauty are abutted against corrosive encounters of racism to jarring effect. 

However, at times the narrative within the poems in Joss moves between the past and present in dizzying ways that may leave the reader unsure of where the narrative “I” sits, in the past or the present. While this shift in time works in a poem such as “chinoiserie,” in other poems like “Alluvial Mining” the shifts leave the reader confused as to the logical leaps and connections being made between the past and the present. The poems where narrative disjunction works to full effect are evidenced in the three erasures in the collection, “the march,” “the history of botany bay” and “the work” which utilise the satirical qualities of erasure to critique articles from the Bulletin’s “Anti-Chinamen Special of 1888” as

foreigners

                                                                                 surrender to
                                                                                                                                                                  everlasting
                              white                                planet                              history

Here Yee is asking us to both face and acknowledge this overt racism that was entrenched by the White Australia Policy and Australian culture. In “longest imperial dragon” the poet points her lens directly at this policy and its effects that ripple out today, “paw paw 婆婆 said, the way through / the immigration restriction act is through the prime minister’s / stomach after the second world war Chinese restaurants / became gwei lo 鬼佬 palatable.” [page 4] The latter poem is an example of the successful rendering of Yee’s surrealist mash-up techniques where enjambment is used to full contrastive effect with, for example, “prime minister’s” scraping against the unexpected “stomach” that opens the following line.

When Yee allows her work to lean into its documentary poetry qualities the poems shine and speak for themselves. The list poem, “2.8km west of Ballarat Bird World,” that recounts the state of the graves of Chinese miners is poignant and touching, as is “Non-European Ancestry” that recounts the names of “Chinese born Australians Who Enlisted in World War 2.” This is where documentary poetry excels, in bringing unknown history to the fore with poetic techniques. Of this style “(heffernan lane)” (with an accompanying archival photograph of women in traditional dress) is a standout poem that combine’s Yee’s skills for bringing history to life in prose poetry while making social commentary, acknowledging the poverty and cultural erasure experienced by a people with a rich history, where she wonders “how do we daughters of middle kingdom – world famous for self-effacement – begin to deconstruct the status quo of colonialist, anthropological government?”

In the last poem of the collection, “This story” Yee writes, “Dysphasia is an inability to arrange words in the proper order due to pressure from a central lesion (thieves looters slavers omniscient narrators).”  With such a prescient line that could have set the tone for the collection it may have been prudent for the poet to place “This story” at the opening of Joss. This would have allowed readers the opportunity to embrace this fragmented style of poetry structure and time shifts within the poems from the outset. While ultimately readers may find Joss a more difficult read than Chinese Fish, the scope of Joss casts a wider net.

Even though Yee may have not hit the mark with every poem in this collection, as a whole Joss succeeds in opening up the reader’s mind to seeing how the Chinese miners whose lives she examines, and their ancestors today spend their time “building tolerance for life’s implacably white horizons.” As historian Anna Clark explains, in the past “the nation’s collective memory was nudged by persistent noise generated outside the formal discipline” of history and will continue to be by important works of docu-poetry such as Grace Yee’s Joss.

References

Clark, A. (2022). Making Australian history: Vintage Books.

Harrington, J. (2011). Docupoetry and archive desire. Jacket2. https://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire\

Hailstones Fell Without Rain

by Natalia Figueroa Barroso

University of Queensland Press

ISBN: 9780702268816

Reviewed by ANNA MERLO

Hailstones Fell Without Rain is a complex story of culture, immigration, sacrifice and, above all else, love. Natalia Figueroa Barroso’s debut novel takes a tri-partite form, with a brief interlude, following the lives of Grachu, Chula and Rita. All three Ferreira women are part of the Uruguayan diaspora, scattered across time and place, but united by the strength of the women in their bloodline.