Author: mascara

Thistle

by Kate Maxwell

ISBN 9781764106870

Recent Works Press

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

Thistle, Kate Maxwell’s third poetry collection, is a book depicting the trajectory of a life, choosing, as its approach, a dipping in and out of time. The collection is dedicated to the poet’s dead mother, whose late-onset dementia is movingly recalled in the elegiac “The Forest and the Trees”:

     When she’s finally gone
                   not like this
                   not this
                   slow scrape of self
     pieces of the past
                                 falling
     like potato peelings
    around her slippered feet

     …………………………

     ever searching, ever trying
     to recall the question
                     she can’t answer
(pp. 7-8)

This poem is echoed in “Into the Forest” in the final section of the book:

     If you ever want to find my mother
                Follow the tissues:
                                those crumpled,
                   hardly damp, thin cotton clouds
     held to twitching lips,   

     ………………………………….

     Like an ancient Gretel,
                 she’s still leaving trails,
                   flagging out her one-way journey
                   into deeper woodlands
(p.100)

2.

and has its conclusion in the evocative “Believe”:
     I used to believe in clouds
     until the roar of a Boeing 737
     dissolved my Kinder innocence,
     back when I’d paint stick-figure
     me and stick-figure you
     floating in a bright blue sky.
     Yet, while reason reminds
     there is nothing above
    nothing to hold in the heavens,
     I believe – like ice crystals
     suspended in the atmosphere –
     you too, are somewhere
(pp.102-3)

“The Forest and the Trees”, and “Kaleidoscope”, both appearing in the opening section of the collection, serve to trigger childhood memories, beginning with “Beyond” – the poet’s recollections of a small country town and her yearning for the extraterrestrial:

     I would lie: palms cradling neck,
     listening to chirp and croak,

                        drinking in jewelled black,
                       brighter than neon, higher than the highest
                        high-rise, more distant than a million strangers.
(p.4)                     

The book’s title, Thistle, and the back-cover statement “Life doesn’t always bloom the way you expect. Sometimes it prickles,” suggest that a number of the poems will deal with life’s disappointments and irritations. These poems, many of which appear in the second section, are a delight – humorous, perspicacious and cutting-edge, providing social comment. In “Waiting in the Queue” Maxwell presents us with the graceless male ahead of her, who

                   flicks his card
  over the machine
  without a word
             to the smiling waitress
               or busy barista                               

then clutching coffee
almost collides into a pram

               3.

               as he wades through
               humans in his way.
(pp.48-9) 

In “Colossus” she takes aim at those unnamed “who could hope to govern the globe”, as: 

A set of opposable thumbs does not grant me dominion.

    Primates, possums, birds – even some frogs
        could hold cutlery, if so inclined.                      

 …………………………………………………..

       yet still we wail at the height of the moon.

How dare it be higher or brighter than us!
   the billionaires cry, punching holes into space
      just to show the damn universe who’s the real boss.
(pp. 57-58)

 “Basking” is another such poem, where the unnamed protagonist is immediately and amusingly identifiable:

The mogul’s getting hitched again
at ninety-three. He can’t seem to make one last
past his plans for an afternoon nap
and world domination.

…………………………

         an empire so layered
         in flashy fabrications
        that he cannot place
                 where he left his last wife
                      or whether he had one at all.

…………………………..

Each crevice sprawled across his chin
a final line in the sand
           for each bride
           who wasn’t what he ordered.
(pp.62-3)

The third and final section of Kate Maxwell’s book, including the already discussed “Into the Forest” and “Believe”, encapsulates a time of looking back and reflection. The beautiful opening poem, “I Cannot Build a Shelter”, engenders a sense of determination to make the best of a flawed and often disappointing world:                        

4.

from hollow sticks in the grass
             snapped with cold fingers   broken
                          with boot   crunched by the claws
                                      of brush turkey feet   hurled skyward

in storm   and too damp to burn
             too fickle   too thin to build shield
                           from the wind   that might thatch
                                         a tense weave   against chill of the night.
(p.77)

But I will build shelter within these small
             words   a home for my yearning layered
                          in script   sealed in dry ink   patched
                                       with hubris and hope   wrapping heart

with the wishes of how it could be
(p.78)

However, humour is not lacking in this deeper, more introspective section, and there is still room for irony and wit at the expense of some of the challenges of modern living. Proof of identity, or even of being human, is one of the more annoying of these, as in the poem “Prove Humanity”:

Check a box
to prove you’re not a box
of whirring parts
wired circuits or stuff
you just don’t understand
then when the box

learns to recognise
our patterns, ways

………………….

then they’ll have to
set the sentient
new challenges −
(p.82)     

Subject matter of the poems in Thistle ranges through personal, political and environmental to keenly observational, and Maxwell is not afraid to reveal heartfelt emotion, or satirise some of the absurdities of the human condition. Experimentation with poetic form and astute wordplay add to the mix, ensuring a multi-faceted perspective. Readers will find much to enjoy in this collection, the more poignant poems continuing to reverberate long after a first reading.

MARGARET BRADSTOCK is a Sydney poet, critic and editor, lectured at UNSW for 25 years, has been Asialink Writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Poetry collections include The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes, the first Australian anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024) is her ninth collection. 

Cannon

Lee Lai

Giramondo

ISBN 9781923106406

Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD
 

The first thing I noticed when I received Lee Lai’s Cannon, slipping it out of its envelope in my quiet living room, was how heavy it was. A large, squarish slab, I imagined it could cause some serious damage if it landed on my toes. Or squish a large cockroach, if I had nothing else at hand. 

Sitting on the couch, I was around twenty pages in when I noticed something strange. There was a weight resting in my body, not unlike the book itself: dense, ungainly, with hard edges that feel awkward in a human hand. It made me want to curve my body inward, or hold my breath, like I was preparing myself for some kind of onslaught. So, I closed the book. I got up and did things I’m supposed to do. Empty the dishwasher. Fold the laundry. As I moved around, the feeling shrank. But it didn’t disappear. 

The life of the titular character, Cannon (known by her family as Lucy) is the focus of Lai’s graphic novel. In the very first scene, before we even reach the title page, she stands in a restaurant, surrounded by broken furniture, shattered crockery and spilled condiments. She’s struck with panic as she takes in the scene, but before abandoning it, she smashes one last plate. 

Rewinding to three months earlier, the novel starts again with a portrait of Cannon’s day-to-day. She’s a Chinese-Canadian, queer young woman who takes care of her ageing gung-gung (grandfather) and works as a chef. She watches horror films with her best friend, Trish, and she runs regularly to a podcast that tells her to ‘release tension’ and ‘breathe’. Her peers refer to her as ‘stoic’ and ‘reliable,’ and her expressions are flat and devoid of emotion, but as the story progresses, we learn that Cannon’s calmness is on a precipice. Magpies gather around her, which no one else can see. Her work goes unappreciated, her hurts go unacknowledged, and she begins having panic attacks as her composure falls away. When her friendship with Trish is about to breakdown and her boss makes a pass at her, she cannot take anymore. Her anger overflows, and she trashes the restaurant in a violent episode where the pages are flooded with red. Afterwards, she slowly begins to rebuild, having learned what pushed her over the edge. 

Lai’s graphic novel is preoccupied with responsibility and rage. Until Cannon’s breakdown, her efforts to be dutiful and unflappable are relentless. She cleans for her gung-gung while her mother ignores her texts. She cooks for Trish, who secretly uses Cannon for creative inspiration. She tries to keep the peace at work while avoiding her lecherous boss, and when her co-worker describes Cannon’s care for her gung-gung as ‘wholesome’, Cannon responds with ‘I just have to do it’. Despite the clear frustration in Cannon’s silences and facial expressions, she acts sensibly and responsibly, refusing to acknowledge pain, accept praise, or ask for help, even when her feet begin blistering, and her doctor asks, ‘my goodness, what have you been doing to yourself?’ But acting in accordance with what other people want and stymieing her own feelings are what build her anger to the point of violence. Trish pinpoints this right before Cannon breaks down in the restaurant:

‘It’s not my problem that you’ve sidelined all of your twenties to deal with other people’s shit. There’s no virtue in being so solitary and self-effacing and resentful, you know.’

Cannon asks questions about how we fulfil our obligations to our family and friends, how we address our own wellbeing, and whether we must sacrifice either. These questions are likely to show up in every life, but their significance in Cannon’s echoes what some describe as ‘the eldest daughter’ experience, where daughters, particularly those in Asian families, feel pressure to take on caretaking and emotional responsibilities from a young age (Chau, Vadakumchery). 

Upon reaching Trish’s words above, I realised these questions were also, in fact, the source of my own discomfort. Having grown up in an Asian immigrant family, these pressures are disturbingly familiar: should I prioritise my personal needs, or the needs of my loved ones? Should I express my own hurt, even if it risks destroying a relationship? Lai does not delve into an examination of how gender, race or sexuality may factor into these questions, but the uneasiness I felt shows just how effectively she brings them to life. 

Riding the wave of her anger, a slightly different Cannon emerges after the trashing of the restaurant. She tells Trish to delete the writing about her, breaks off a confusing relationship with her co-worker, and insists on a response from her mother. After over two-hundred pages of compliance, her confrontations are satisfying to watch, and in response, her friends and loved ones shift toward her rather than away: several coworkers cover up her wrecking of the restaurant, her mother starts engaging with her gung-gung, and Trish takes care of Cannon’s meals. This shift paints anger as a tool for catharsis and communicating one’s needs, rather than one for inflicting damage, or cutting people and responsibilities ‘out’. Even Trish’s response to hearing about the magpies, which have always appeared when Cannon feels overwhelmed, reiterates the idea of rage as helpful: ‘They’re probably just looking out for you.’ 

In a final scene, Cannon receives the news that her gung-gung has died in hospital. At this point, I wondered if his death would be framed as some kind of ‘freedom’ for Cannon: his care is potentially the most onerous of her responsibilities, which are already in quick decline. However, after hanging up the phone, she sits alone and cries, surrounded again by magpies. At the end of a novel that largely presents Cannon’s efforts as challenging and unappreciated, her grief complicates the idea that care becomes a burden when it is unreciprocated. 

I have not read many graphic novels, but Lai’s skill with the form is obvious even to me. The writing is almost exclusively dialogue, and her illustrations are deceptively simple: black and white, with minimal shading on soft, curved faces and bodies. Wordless panels, both close-up and wide, evoke lonely silence and unease, while moments of fury are punctuated with swathes of red. Throughout, Lai skilfully shows how Cannon’s relationships transform, often via conversations that feel innocuous until the characters’ expressions and quiet reactions are revealed. Additionally, Cannon’s racial and queer identity is acknowledged on the page without interrogation, making for a sincere, refreshing representation of realities we often do not see in fiction. 

Rather than an escape, Cannon is a painfully and earnestly realistic graphic novel. It explores Cannon’s struggles with her commitments, her restrained anger, her fraying friendships, and ageing family, and her emotions are so vivid that I could feel her anxiety spiralling across each panel. It centres Cannon’s perspective as a queer, second-generation Chinese woman with a level of honesty that feels rare, but every experience and character is so fleshed out that the novel’s strength becomes its ability to show life’s tenderness and cruelty, and the mundane parts in-between. For that reason, I think there is much more that could be said about Cannon besides the things that struck me hardest. But now that I know what Lai’s capable of, I look forward to reading her past work, and anything she releases in the future.  
 
References

Chau, Shannon. ‘The curse of the (eldest) Asian daughter.’ The Oxford Student, 20 January 2024. www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/01/20/the-curse-of-the-eldest-asian-daughter. 
Vadakumchery, Tracy. ‘Is It Eldest Daughter Syndrome, Or Is It Something Else?’ The Bad Indian Therapist, 29 October 2025. thebadindiantherapist.com/indian-therapist-blog/south-asian-eldest-daughter-syndrome.
 
ISABEL HOWARD is a Filipino Australian writer based in Nipaluna / Hobart. Her work has previously been published by Mascara Literary Review, Contemporary Art Tasmania’s Journal, kindling & sage, and more. Having completed her Honours in creative writing at the University of Tasmania, she is currently working towards completing a young adult fiction novel.

Bathypelagia

by Debbie Lim

Cordite Books

ISBN 978-0-6457616-6-5

A review by LISA COLLYER

Bathypelagia is Debbie Lim’s first poetry collection (a chapbook Beastly Eye  appeared in 2012, with Vagabond Press) and is similarly preoccupied with the blurred line between human animals and wild fauna. If Bathypelagia is read in the context of production of the global shit show, the descent into the midnight zone seems a place of respite. There is a domestic feel to these poems, following a lover, a child, or the petrified remains of ordinary people in the wake of a volcanic eruption. The descent into the farthest and furthest depths of the ocean also hint to rising seawaters in the context of the Anthropocene, and the necessity to look towards havens of resilience when the lights go out.

The first section of the collection, ‘Midnight zone’ begins profoundly in the bathyal zone and is a pragmatic exploration of romance in the dark. The poem ‘Love Below 2000 Metres’ (p.3) is sensually survivalist, as sex takes place grappling in the dark, wrought out of desperation to feed, to hide, to spawn, and accidentally consummate.

It is difficult to speak of love at these depths.
Instead we live by other callings: attraction, hunger,

a fatal curiosity. Attempts at transcendence merely
destroy us. The only way to survive: make a bower

out of darkness. Or invent your own light:
worm of deception, burning weed, false ship of safety.

‘Love Below 2000 Metres’
(p.3)

If transcendence is the goal of art, then Lim’s poems are the benchmark to erasing the spatial borders between beings. In ‘My Son the cephalopod’ (pp.8-9) the zoomorphic characterisation of the small child slipstreams between octopus and infant. The camouflage of beast or baby, only a mother could love (fuelled by chemicals) with its oversized head, and mercurial moods: love and hate sidle. The poem tracks the tireless work of a parent dealing with the dependent yet independent-seeking child: their tentacles grasping for choke hazards, or projecting food for wall art. Finally, the parent’s attempts at constraint are tentacles cradled beneath the covers and the embrace of sea swell.

‘Every night
I rattle on about the moon, tuck tentacles down
and attempt to rock in a way that resembles
the movement, the approximate weight
of an ocean.’

‘My son the cephalopod’
(pp.8-9)

In the witching hour, men sleep, in a unique ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean while the speaker (perhaps female) observes and acts: a nod to the lion share caring load women carry. There is talk of coupling for reproduction and a setting free of offspring. Occasionally there is longing when a flash mob of top feeders or a sinking carcass bedazzles. But a resigned lack of romance prevails, except the sensory rhythmic patterns gently lulling the reader into a comforting acceptance of life without light.

Sometimes I miss the old life.
Occasionally, we receive fresh news
from above (a flash migration, the latest slick)
but the buzz rarely lasts. Then it’s back

to the grind as usual.

‘A Bar in Bathypelagia’
(pp.10-11)

Lim’s animal explorations are landed too, in museums or conserved in fossils, indicating the longevity of life beyond the watery depths, in poems, such as ‘A Taxidermied Sunfish’ (p.12) and ‘The Fossil Maker’ (pp.13). This continuous lineage works elegantly with the themes of reproduction, memory, and culture that emanate across this sumptuous collection, with its lullaby rhythms toing-and-froing like the baby being swooned to sleep. We too, are invited to sink and accept the darkness, make our own light, and find ways to cope.

There is tension in the second part ‘Fin, Bone’ where the domestic transforms to a suffocating cage where untamed mythic beasts seek freedom in a series of intertextual explorations. The blistering poem, ‘Love Note from the Medusa’ (p.21) uses the first-person speaker to occupy the gorgon in kinky overtures, one who speaks of agency and unyielding desire.

‘Underestimated,
I trail my tangled
boudoir, chains
lit up with toxins.
I am (in fact) not
vain, simple self-
sufficient, loyal
to the old currents
and my own
slow lacy appetites.’

‘Love Note from the Medusa’
(p. 21)

Transformation also comes in the form of bound feet, in a numbered poem, that reads like an instruction manual with imperatives on how to turn feet into lotus bulbs. The complicit mutilation is instigated by the mother on the daughter and continues (until outlawed), following cultural traditions, in an eerily prosaic tone. Beauty and abjection embrace and repel beneath the sole. There is an intersectional feminist probe: of gender, culture and class here, where the bound feet transform the woman with lotus feet into one, who is waited upon, rather than being the one to serve.

4.
Every second day
turn your ears to stone. Unwrap
the bandage and ignore her crying

as you re-bind them,
each time tighter. Remind yourself,
as your own mother did,
that there is no such thing as a truly
liberated foot.’

‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34)

Lim’s poems converse with one another, often with the the motif of stone. Whether it be ‘ears to stone’ (‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34) or passive representations of ‘Women in classical Chinese love poems’ (p.35) to the petrified ‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36). Recall the Medusa? The mise-en-scene of an unexpected domestic death are bodies mid-sentence, crawling away, and halted by the infamous volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BC. The abrupt endings of each line mimic the truncated lives, yet entombed in legend, ordinary lives now transcended to museum artefacts.

‘Unburied, they weigh more than bone ever could.
They have shaken off the ash and refuse to rest. So many

stopped limbs. Mouth holes, eye holes, a balled fist.’

‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36)

The concluding section ‘Air’ draws breath and brings life to ground, beginning with our museum obsession with exhibiting exotica. The violent romance of ‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45) speaks to the human desire of scientific classification and public curiosity. We are challenged to see our perverse curios as rebirthed, while the ungainly wrenching from the ocean is cleverly wrought in a one-way bargaining agreement between collector and fish.

‘I have noticed the fused bones of your mouth
set in their small surprised o. How, tentative,

you near my gaping window. I say only this:

think of it as a second birth, your odd calling.’

‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45)

Lim’s poems often sit side by side in a conversation of opposites, like ‘Captive’ (p. 50) where death (a blue ringed octopus) is caught then humanely released, and ‘Praying Mantis’ (p.51) the only living thing in a brush of dead wood. Or ‘Gift of the Sloth (p.52) another instruction manual on occupying tree habitat, and the way in which the fur of the sloth is habitat to ‘beetles, moths and mites’ (p. 52). This poem is juxtaposed to ‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53) with directives of courtesy for the sake of safety in polite (arboreal) society.

‘Respect the branch tips
of others. Learn to get by
on minimal sleep (which is, in any case,
intended for the weak and mobile).
But travel your roots boldly
through darkness and to great depths’

‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53)

Lim’s Bathypelagia is a collection of multidimensional expansiveness. The auricles of an ear, the habitat of sloth fur, or the plumbs of the ocean are occupied by beings of fur, fin, and flesh interchangeably. The domestic zone (a cage of sorts) is transcended with imagination that migrates beyond atmospheres, beneath and above. The lines between these zones are blurred and the status of beings transcended. A bound foot is a girl mutilated, yet elevated; or the noxious fumes of a volcano elevate everyday life to exhibit status.
 
LISA COLLYER is the author of two poetry collections, Gold Digger (2025) and How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023), the latter being short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award, and both published with Life Before Man Books. Her personal essay, ‘Prolonged Exposure’ is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ was short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She was a recent artist in residence for The National Trust of W.A. and Bundanon Art Museum. She is currently writing a literary novel on grief, booze and jazz.

Growing Up Indian in Australia

Edited by Aarti Betigeri,

Black Inc

Reviewed by MISBAH WOLF

 

Growing Up Indian in Australia is a collection that resists neat summary. What it offers instead is an accumulation of lived moments—memories, ruptures, negotiations of identity—that sit between cultures, between generations, and between belonging and estrangement. The stories do not attempt to resolve these tensions. Rather, they dwell within them, allowing multiple, sometimes contradictory experiences to coexist.

Reading this collection, I found myself engaging as a reader, but as someone who also exists between worlds—raised in 1980s Brisbane with a Pakistani father who did not speak much English and a white mother. Many of these stories felt deeply familiar to me. Not identical, but recognisable in their emotional texture: the small humiliations, the negotiations, the quiet adaptations. There is a shared undercurrent across the anthology that belonging is not simply given, but continually shaped through memory, environment and social expectation.

One of the most striking formal elements of the collection is the inclusion of childhood photographs alongside many of the stories. These images create a subtle but powerful dialogue between past and present. It feels as though the adult voice is in conversation with the child self—the child finally being given space to speak, to be seen, and to be understood. The result is not nostalgic, but reflective and, at times, reparative—it is in a true sense the Hero/Heroine’s Journey.

Across the anthology, many of the stories begin with a single, cutting line that anchors the reader in a moment of exposure. In Shamna Sanam’s Dual Identities Down Under, the opening—“Ever since primary school, I have felt out of touch with my Australian peers”—immediately establishes a sense of distance. This is grounded in everyday experiences: bringing idli and coconut chutney to school with embarrassment, anticipating comments about smell, and being asked reductive questions such as “Do you speak Indian?” or whether Indians “eat curry every day.”

What is particularly striking is how these external moments become internalised. Sanam poses a series of questions: “Is it bad if I keep hold of my culture? … Is it bad if I hate Vegemite? … Is it bad if I’m not the smartest in maths and science?” These culminate in the more confronting question: “Is it bad if I and other Indian women, men and children don’t meet your standards?” Here, Australianness is revealed not as neutral, but as a set of expectations against which difference is measured. At the same time, the piece moves toward a more reflective position, acknowledging that some of these early encounters are shaped by childhood ignorance and that identity does not need to be hidden in order to belong.

Michelle Cahill’s A Chutney Alphabet of Anglo-Indian Spells approaches identity through fragmentation, using the structure of an alphabet to move between memory, language and experience. Familiar elements—food, family, ritual—sit alongside moments of racialisation and erasure. The line “My Australian school friends overlooked the dark history that textbooks erased” situates personal memory within a broader national context, where histories are selectively remembered or omitted, and we do indeed live in a country that was invaded and an entire history and place never ceded.

Sharon Verghis’ A Tale of Three Beaches reconfigures the Australian beach as a shifting and politically charged space. What begins as a site of “camouflage and acceptance and a tribe” becomes, in the context of the Cronulla riots, a site of exclusion. The movement between Klang and suburban Sydney highlights the sensory dislocation of migration, contrasting dense, layered soundscapes with an almost artificial quiet. The story ultimately gestures toward a form of reclamation, suggesting that identity is something carried across places rather than fixed within them.

In Natasha Pinto’s When I’m in Australia, and When There’s No One I Know, identity is shaped through inherited memory- the memories we carry from our mothers, our fathers and those silences too. The opening image of a mother falling near a train station, alone and unaided, becomes foundational—an expression of vulnerability that carries across generations. The pressure to belong manifests through code-switching, altered accents, and the striking image of a child flipping her hand to reveal a “white” palm as proof of belonging.

Questions of gender and performance emerge in Hardeep Dhanoa’s Feeling Free in Kings Cross, where the expectations of being a “good Indian girl” are set against the desire for autonomy and self-expression. Similarly, Kishor Napier-Raman’s An Incomplete Guide to Every Type of Brown Guy in the West uses humour and classification to catalogue different masculine archetypes, revealing the confusion and contradictions that arise within diasporic identity.

Kavita Bedford’s Practising Yoga explores cultural appropriation and internal dislocation in a globalised context. The narrator reflects on the experience of seeing her cultural heritage reframed through wellness spaces, where “200-hour Anglo yoga teachers” become authoritative voices. The question—“Just because I can say the words and have the blood, does it really mean I have some claim over them?”—captures a deep ambivalence. The story moves between these spaces and broader geopolitical realities, creating a dissonance that culminates in the repeated line, “I am scared, I am scared, I am scared.” The question that follows—“What is the child’s pose for being trapped between worlds?”—resonates as one of the central tensions of the collection.

In Rachael Jacobs’ My Other Mother, the relationship to the “motherland” is framed as both formative and confronting. The narrator’s encounter with India as a child introduces an awareness of inequality, complexity and responsibility that cannot be undone. “The knowledge of the life you could have lived is a blessing and a curse,” she writes, capturing the enduring impact of that awareness. The story moves beyond pity, instead holding both the beauty and difficulty of that connection.

Across the collection, there are also quieter but persistent traces of longer histories—colonial entanglements, cultural translation, and the afterlives of empire. These are not always foregrounded, but they are felt in the tensions that run through the narratives, in the sense that identity is shaped not only by personal experience but by historical forces that continue to reverberate.

With its range of voices, Growing Up Indian in Australia does not attempt to present a singular account of identity. Instead, it offers multiplicity—stories that sit alongside one another without needing to resolve into a unified whole. What emerges is a collection that creates space: for reflection, for contradiction, and for voices that articulate what it means to live between worlds- liminal but very deeply corporeal.

 
MISBAH WOLF is a poet and performer, and the co-editor of Crip Stories. She was shortlisted in the Wesley Michel Wright prize for Rooftops in Karachi. She has received a grant from Creative Victoria, and is a Red Room Poetry Fellow in 2026.

The Drop Off

by David Stavanger

Upswell

ISBN 978-0-6459840-8-8

Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY

David Stavanger’s The Drop Off is a reflection on divorce and shared parenthood and a paean of sorts to his son, interrupted by expressions of world weariness with the institutions of modern capitalism, an alternative alienation, and near-ekphrastic reactions to a painting by Marcel Duchamp and a photograph George Karger (of Marcel Duchamp). Stavanger’s evident love and admiration for his son, to whom the work is dedicated, offsets the bitterness that surfaces occasionally and withstands the humour that tends more to sublimate than expunge the irony. It is hard to gauge when the divorce poems might have been written given his son is almost an adult by the end of the collection.

Stylistically, The Drop Off is a collage of forms–verse and prose poetry, satire, the recompilation of found or invented phrases, redactions, what might pass as micro-fiction and even a table of wordplay he labels ‘Dad/Bingo’, and is framed as one continuous collection. Within that, ‘The Drop Off’ is a sequence of sixteen parts that starts at no. 3. It is prefaced by ‘The Chess Game’, the first of the Duchamp poems where, perhaps somewhat tartly, “we’re willing to sacrifice our Queens” and “One day we’ll play/without consent order/on the outskirts of Paris” (p11); ‘I’ve been thinking about your birth lately’, in which “I crave the crown of fine hair, the physicality of the child” (p12) and “It’s hard to say what kind of parents we will become./ There’s no way to inoculate against this future heartbreak” (p13), the second line of retroactive effect; and ‘Joint Statement’, which abounds in seemingly cut-out “post-truth” (p14) euphemisms that attempt a positive and mutual gloss on the decision to separate, e.g. “parting ways is as natural as procreating” (p14) and “we have mutually resolved to end this transaction amicably” (p14) yet, at the same time, “it’s really hard to hard-launch this divorce” (p15). This is humour with a sardonic edge and pleads for a human place in the production process that divorce has become.

‘The Drop Off’ itself chronicles the immediate aftermath of the divorce, that “modern dilemma” (p16), the new rituals of the drop off, the pick-up and the “duck pond” (p18) as neutral territory, the recalibration of Father’s Day, a move interstate and chaperoned flights, a third person “care navigator” (p27) to oversee exchanges, the emergence of new partners and the distance that might overtake communications with an ex-partner. The final stanza of this sequence (p31) captures the dislocation and loss engendered by these experiences but also the acceptance that his son needs to chart a way through them to find their own place:

Last night you dreamt about receiving a call
requesting you come down to the station
to verify your son’s identity. You offered
the officer memories, together and apart.
The dream police don’t accept these as proof.
They show you a photo of who your son could be.
When you are awake, they are free to choose their fate.

Stavanger changes tack for the next twenty pages or so and, four poems in, to prose formats. As suggested earlier, these changes are not announced by a new section, but are offered possibly as the next movement in a symphony of sorts that will return eventually to its underlying theme in later movements. Things are not as sequestered as this sounds and concerns occasionally bleed across each other as you might expect in something that is as both conscious and sub-conscious as poetry. An alternative take might be that the poet has been rendered generally out-of-joint with the world.

This is not intended to invalidate the concerns he expresses which range across the environment, militarism and commerce. The personal also intrudes in a variety of medical settings. Examples of the poetry here include:

If it burns, tax it. If it keeps burning, regulate it. And if it stops
burning, subsidise it. I am sick of the government being in my life.

– ‘[We’re going to get nailed]’, p33.

Henry Kissinger is dead.
Never a war he didn’t adore.
‘Credible military threats’ can be subdued.
– ‘Disconcerting tendencies’, p34.

… our lungs are an auditorium of unsustainable applause.

– ‘recline’, p36.

“The kidney that was removed when I was seventeen
is still out there seeking sensations, ghosts of organs

[3]

never mature into a functioning self”
– ‘Cystometrogram’, p38.

… Dentistry VS Psychiatry. Being in people’s mouths versus being in people’s heads. Psychiatrists =
no expensive equipment or supples. Still get to drill holes in people. Dentist = based on science and a
love of soft drinks. Still get to have an intimate relationship with someone in a chair.

– ‘← Intensifier →’, p42

The oscillation between oculist and occultist,
the crumpled coat on the road vs a dead body
[knowledge of the measurable/knowledge of the hidden].

– ‘Vision’, p50

The two currents merge more fully in ‘The Experience Economy’, which is presented in square-bracketed paragraphs and as extended, satirical wordplay. The poem journeys from childbirth, “a destination”, where “goods and services” are required as well as “unpaid labour” for the “assembly” work, the product of “the sensation of desire as existential demand, delivery as constant supply” and the “first-born … a non-fungible commodity” (pp54-57). The poem continues in this vein until “a shared calendar” emerges where “coloured squares will remind you who you planned to love”.

After traversing topics that range from swimming with his son, jaffas at the cinema, almost anachronistic perhaps, the Lindt café siege, a previously unknown sister from an out-of-wedlock relationship of the poet’s mother, kale as a substitute mother, buying a dog, child support, Texan relatives and the life of a tenant, the collection arrives at another important sequence with numbered instalments and concomitant with the parent theme, ‘Fifteen ways to be erased’, co-written by Stavanger and his son, Saul. It is an exploration of bullying, which “is a sea of faces, morphing and changing. Its only desire is to consume itself is consume itself” (p85). It is also an experience shared in different ways and times by father and son. There are aspects of refuge, subterfuge, moving schools and tendencies for authority figures to doubt the veracity of the report and advise parent and son to ignore name-calling. The latter are perhaps as damaging as the bullying–“Hesitation marks appear in the margins of my son’s learning. They begin to doubt words, even when they were written down or bolded in emails or on their own lips …Every adult … becomes unreliable” (p83). ‘Montage’ offers a happy ending of sorts where the protagonists’ relationship attains a warming and assured integrity–“David is holding the compression of time. Both hands are closed and open. Stills are spilling from his mouth (positive and negative). There are no other props or cast nearby” (p100).

David Stavanger is a wry commentator with a propensity and fondness for bons mots, but who nonetheless feels deeply. For me the two strands are not always double-helical, nor is the interweaving of the social with the intimate across poems in this unbroken collection. This is probably as much personal preference as criticism. What cannot be disputed is Stavanger’s love for his son and their graduation into a self-sustained life. Love strikes me as the ultimate destination of this collection, and we can all arrive happily there.

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/.

Hollow Air

by Verity Borthwick

Ultimo Press

ISBN 9781761154195

Reviewed by LUCY CHRISTOPHER

When I finished Hollow Air by Verity Borthwick and turned off my tiny reading light, it was suddenly tar-dark and death-quiet. Borthwick’s book had swallowed me; I was still stuck deep underground, navigating dusty tunnels, feeling my hand across sharp rock to get out and away. My heart was racing. I breathed deeper and listened to the room’s blackness in the hot late-summer night. Soon, I distinguished their breathing: my husband deep and steady, my daughter lighter and with a musical hum; both very much here, both real. I tried to ascend from the story that had gripped me by the throat until I discovered its end. My skin prickled with sweat, and there was grit stuck to my back and dust caught in the corners of my eyes.

This is how Hollow Air stayed in my body. For days afterward, my mind returned to the twisting underworld of the abandoned mining tunnels in the novel’s final, nightmarish scenes. Over and again, I imagined being trapped in the tunnels, contorting my body through ever-smaller gaps, scaling spider-like up crumbling walls with yawning chasms below. Unlike Sarah, the protagonist who eventually does discover a way through this erebus, I imagined being trapped forever underground, unable to ever see again, relying on touch and smell to find the possibility of an exit. I felt dirty and dusty and ill at ease, with a powerful desire to never visit the abandoned mines of far north Queensland, where the novel is set.

Notwithstanding my strongly visceral reaction, Hollow Air is a curious novel to describe. Various reviews have labelled Borthwick’s debut as a psychological thriller, a piece of rural gothic, or a modern Australian ghost story. Roslyn Jolly, in the Sydney Review of Books describes it as “…the latest addition.. [in the]…flourishing” canon of texts that is the “Australian mining novel.” In truth, it is all these things and yet, it is none of them deeply.

Set mostly in and around a mine in monsoonal, sweltering Queensland, the novel shifts between two timelines: an historical narrative from 1910 about the descent and ultimate death of Samuel and Tom in the Ada Dulcie mine, and the current-day story of Sarah, a geologist stationed alone at the same mine site, tasked with an unenviable job of trying to discover rock valuable enough to reopen it. Sarah’s isolation is shattered when a new team, including the sultry geologist Cole, arrives to start drilling, forcing her to re-navigate and position her body in an all-male environment. Though Sarah’s story is given the most weight, and page time, the back story of Samuel and Tom’s deaths intrudes and infiltrates everywhere, pressuring Sarah’s story with constant threat of ghostly presences and the sense that the past, and the deceit and tragedies that occurred there, will always erode the present.

Hollow Air is no doubt a novel preoccupied with the body. Borthwick’s writing is deeply sensory and atmospheric, her landscape never a passive setting but a seductive and fierce character and body in its own right. Throughout reading, I was tense, uncomfortable, looking over my shoulder for predatory creatures or questionable Australian men. There are many physical jumps and bodily prickles throughout the book – the near miss of a snake bite, the constant feeling of being watched, and many times where Sarah is surprised by a sudden arrival of a human, animal or something dead.

Borthwick cleverly brings the body, and its physicality, into this book in other ways too. Throughout, Borthwick describes the arid land as, and in parallel with, a human body:

“She could never get over the feeling of being the first human to lay eyes on this rock sliced out of the ground – was this how the early anatomists had felt when they cut into the body and saw the sinews tangled there? …. Like a doctor listening to a heartbeat with a stethoscope, you could feel the edges of the organ and wonder at its function, place your palm above it and feel the muscle pulse beneath your fingertips….” (97)

Borthwick also draws parallels between the land and Sarah herself, often suggesting the land is embodied, marked, and vulnerable in ways that mirror her own physical and psychological state: “…like the ground left behind when the ore was removed, she too was riddled with holes.” (49) At times, it even seems that the mine and Sarah’s body become entirely one being: “… she felt she had become part of the mine, that it now flowed in her veins and pooled in her gut.” (287-288)

The threat of danger – both to the land and to Sarah, the novel’s two central “bodies” – is ever-present, as is the potential for exploitation and abuse. Sarah, like the mined land she inhabits, has been shaped and damaged by her interactions with men, and both she and the land must ultimately have their cores cut open and their insides examined to uncover meaning in their own stories. Additionally, both Sarah and the land inflict their own suffering to the men who interact with them. Sarah misses her own engagement party to sleep with fellow geologist Cole, and the land traps and injures men who dare to transgress it. In this way, perhaps Borthwick’s novel seeks to examine how deeply our lives are entangled with the patriarchal and colonial mining industry we hold an uneasy relationship with; an industry that exploits and harms, leaving behind scars that are difficult to heal, yet one we remain dependent on for survival and prosperity in modern, settler Australia.

Throughout, Borthwick’s knowledge of her subject matter is assured and a significant strength of the novel. After reading, I felt not only dusty but as if I’d learnt something about how geologists assess a mining landscape in terms of its value as well as a deeper understanding of a mine’s sedimentary beauty. I also appreciated Borthwick’s female FIFO protagonist, whose capability is consistently evident; as physically and mentally strong as any other mining character ever written. However, while Sarah is no doubt a fascinating character, I did not find her particularly appealing or one always easy to understand. I struggled to grasp what Sarah saw in her fiancé Scott, or why she hadn’t ended the engagement earlier. We’re given little sense of what attracted Sarah and Scott together in the first place, or whether she was always so closed-off towards him. Cole, too, the book’s mysterious and threatening love interest, is not given much character depth. What is he beyond a beautiful body and bundle of secrets? What might he have brought to the story apart from threat and desire? Although, Borthwick’s landscape is layered with remarkable depth and texture, it seems the characters are, at times, afforded less of that same complexity.

Overall, Hollow Air is a significant and vivid Australian novel, one that places women in a role rarely seen in fiction and interrogates Australia’s relationship with its mining industry from the inside out. It’s exploration of the cost of concealing our ‘dirty little secrets’, whether they be personal or public, feels fresh and interesting. Ultimately, though, it is Borthwick’s ability to embed the sensory details of this world inside the bodies of her readers that make this novel linger long and uncomfortably. I am fascinated to see what she writes next.

Cited

Jolly, Roslyn. ‘Critical/Mineral’. Sydney Review of Books, 01 December 2025. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/criticalmineral

LUCY CHRISTOPHER is an award-winning author for young adults, children, and adults, with wide readership. Release, her recent psychological thriller for adults, was shortlisted for a Davitt Award and is currently in development for a TV series. She has worked as an academic in Creative Writing for twenty years, beginning her career at Bath Spa University, where she was a Reader in Creative Writing and Course Director on the world-renowned MA in Writing for Young People. She now works as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Tasmania, while juggling her best creative output yet: her daughter.

The Nightmare Sequence

Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed

UQP

ISBN 9780702268908

Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD
 

Omar Sakr, readers will already know as an incredibly talented, prolific, and award-winning writer. Yet this collection is beyond, and so crucial in this moment. It is immensely powerful, intense, raw, and immeasurably heavy, yet it is at the same time delicately crafted, deeply sensitive, and soft. The poems are illustrated with beautiful artworks by Safdar Ahmed. This is a collection of poetry and illustrations that is on another level. Sakr’s poetic voice is a call to moral clarity and humanity that is so desperately needed in this moment. A call to humanity from the soul of heartbreak. The collection is a series of poems titled variously ‘…in the genocide’. A circling repetition that situates us always within the nightmare that the media and powerful would prefer to ignore, minimise, or outright deny, yet which cannot be unseen and must be confronted. As Randa Abdel-Fattah notes, this book is an “astonishingly original collaboration by two artists who are committed to the intimacies of humanity, the details of injustice, and uncompromising truth-telling” (n. pag.). These poems that Sakr originally shared on Instagram, as the genocide unfolded on our screens in horrific unbearable footage of children, babies, bodies, unfathomable destruction and anguish before our very eyes, forever changing everything. Some of these Nightmare Sequence poems were also originally published in various journals such as Westerly, Cordite, and Southerly, ‘Walking to day care in the Genocide’ (Southerly p.108), and have also appeared as translations, such as ‘Graze in the Genocide’ appearing in Cordite and Point de Chute, in which personal parenting experiences are simultaneously contextualised and contextualising the genocide within these deeply realised themes of love, protection, human connection, and care. The poems each hold a light of truth, grief, witness and care, like the many candles of a vigil, lit from the flame of love, together forming a beacon of hope to insist that this genocide is always the context, that this cannot be forgotten, normalised, accepted, and that we can never become numb to it.

In the face of such extreme dehumanisation and disregard for the enormous number of people, and the extreme number of children killed in Gaza – Sakr writes: ‘Every child’s corpse is mine, I fear / Not being able to undo this grim fatherhood, / I fear its undoing even more’ (‘Limits in the genocide’ 80). This profoundly emotionally honest collection opens with two quotations, and each poem intricately carries their traces, in its own ways. The first, from Isabella Hamad, who wrote the lines “To remain human at this / juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: /It is the most honest place from which to speak.”, which is echoed in Sakr’s dual fears of not only ‘this grim fatherhood’ but the fear of ‘its undoing even more’ (80) – the undoing which would mean the undoing of truth, and of humanity itself. As this repetition in the titles continuously calls the reader back to this context of the unfolding nightmare, and the ongoing acknowledgement that each thing, each day that takes place does so ‘…in the genocide’. It is recalled, remembered, re-centred, repeatedly in a sequence of days, in the passage of ‘normal’ time and abstract, in its usual calendar of days marked and unmarked by holidays and observances of altered importance: in the minutia of the day-to-day, and in the cumulations of days – ‘100 days in the genocide’, ‘300 days in the genocide’, Ramadan, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, in the genocide, and of specific dates. Sakr’s poems insist, rightly so, that everything we experience, is occurring ‘in the genocide’ – even that one date so centred by the western media, is here ‘October 7th in the Genocide’ a poem in which Sakr writes:

You think I fear to enter October 7th?
Habibi, I never left. I’m still there with you
Dying as I do every day. I admit I can’t see
the murdered you heap murder on.
…
For me the world breaks every day.
(65)

We, as readers, are reminded repeatedly that there need be no such reminder, and that nothing, for people of conscience, can ever be experienced ‘as usual’ without this outrage beyond comprehension being the wider context, and without its relationality to this unthinkably inhumane imperial genocide, being brought continuously back into both questioning and heartbreak. To not see things as the western media has presented them, but rather in terms of ‘humanity’ and its antithesis, hearts beating with love or death for us all – including the death of the heart. Sakr writes ‘My hands are cramped around a million epitaphs. / It will take me roughly all the time in the world to get there.’ (65)

On the facing page to ‘October 7th in the genocide’ is a high contrast black and white illustration by Safdar Ahmed. These artworks are interspersed throughout the collection and interact powerfully with the poetry. In this image, part of the ‘Genocide Culture’ series, there is a young, frightened child being held in a choke hold by a soldier with their military uniform, hat, gloves and equipment strapped on and wearing dark glasses covering the face, while the child is in a plain t-shirt with wide open eyes, this juxtaposition of power imbalance with the words ‘GENOCIDE’ and ‘CULTURE’ placed top and bottom in alternating black and white. A similar illustration faces the poem ‘Say in the genocide’

Say this has no purpose.
Say no one reads it.
Am I not alive to myself?
Say it is meaningful.
Say everyone reads it.
More, say it’s understood.
Now we’re talking.
Say my feeling meets yours
And together they deepen…
(p.54)

This precise meeting and deepening of feeling, in reading Sakr’s poems, feels impossible not to experience. This is the emotional level on which they operate, and readers in reading it enter into the second option, the creation of meaningfulness. Facing this poem is the illustration of men rounded up, sitting on the ground, their eyes covered with blindfolds, their hands tied behind their backs while an armed soldier stands over them. In the notes to these illustrations, these are described as ‘a series of images that attempts to highlight what our leaders cannot be brought to admit: that a ‘close friend’…is committing the most abhorrent crime humanity is capable of.’ (158).

Bearing witness to this nightmare, and embracing remembrance, solidarity and truth-telling, are linked themes. These are ways of maintaining our humanity, in the face of inhumanity, evoked here from the outset. We bear witness. Poems that emerge from living through a nightmare, terror, something that seems so horrific and so abhorrent to our moral values as human beings as to be beyond reality – the disbelief of immense grief as it is experienced.

This response recalls again the quotation from the eminent Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish:

“‘Who remembers the Armenians?’
I remember them
and I ride the nightmare bus with them
each night”

‘I remember them’ from Darwish’s 2014 Collection Nothing more to lose, the first collection to appear in English language. Darwish’s poem continues: “and my coffee, this morning /I’m drinking it with them”. Not only collective remembrance is being signified here but also a collective poetic solidarity, a reminder that, despite cultures of individualism, mythologies of the lone poet, we are not actually alone in our grief, or resistance, in our remembrance and our speaking against genocide, we are part of a larger thing, a collective of people who refuse to accept this horror. It recalls in turn Sarah M. Saleh’s lines from the poem ‘Say free Palestine’ – ‘for I love you say free Palestine’ – conveying this same sense that remembrance, and grief, which may be another side of resistance and liberatory will, permeates everything, each day, from coffee, to words to walks to daycare, to poetry to love to death. In ‘200 days in the genocide’ Sakr writes

I poem this.
Everything in the genocide
Is the shadow of a real
Me: a blunt tear
In the mouth of an angel.
(103)

To face the truth and express our grief and resistance, is a way to reach each other, to do so together.

References

Darwish, Najwan, Nothing more to lose, Penguin, 2014
Sakr, Omar, ‘Walking to day care in the Genocide’, Southerly, January vol. 80 no. 1 2025; (p. 108)
‘Graze in the Genocide’, Omar Sakr, 2024, Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February no 111 2024
‘Graze in the Genocide’ Omar Sakr, 2024, Point de Chute, Spring no. 8 2024
Saleh, Sarah M., The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat UQP 2023
 
 
KATIE HANSORD is a writer and researcher working on unceded Wurundjeri lands in Naarm. Her interests include poetry, intersectional feminism, anti-imperialism and disability justice. She is co-editor of Crip Stories (NewSouth). Her work appears in Unusual Work, Mascara, Southerly Long Paddock.