Author: mascara

The Drama Student

by Autumn Royal

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922725394

Reviewed by PARIS ROSEMONT

It is not often one encounters a poetry collection that stays so Desdemona-faithful to the thematic premise of its title. Autumn Royal’s The Drama Student (Giramondo, 2023) delivers. It opens with the poem ‘Causing a scene’, a prologue of sorts to the sections that follow, aptly punctuated into: ‘Scene One’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Scene Two’, and ‘Encore’. Each poem in this collection interacts with the notion of performance in various guises – whether on the stage, or behind the scenes. The narratives shift and morph like a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors. We see only the selective fragments the poet has chosen to share, glimpsing a fractured world of intrigue and curiosities. The result is intimate and quirky, confusing, humorous, and at times confronting.

Theatrical references abound. From anecdotes about auditions (p1), dramatic method (p10), agents and roles (pp17-18), melodrama and searing acts (p21), casting (pp22-23), theatrical skills and dimly lit tragedies (p41), plotlines (p42), and authentic dialogue (p43), the list can—and does—go on. This sweeping theatrical epic culminates in a five-page opus titled ‘Soliloquy’ (pp59-63). The collection’s central theme is indelibly embedded into each poem. One of the great strengths of Royal’s writing lies in the multi-layered richness of concept and wordplay. Often, this is presented via metaphysical observations:

One must become perverse when adapting
to this genre. I’ve flattened myself to fit through
scripted doorways and babbled away
my dimensions. This leaves no suspense.
We’re dealing with pre-existing material
and I’ve forgotten who speaks next. I need a prompt –
(‘Raising a subject’ p5)

Royal holds the reader captivated by the performative confessional. Yet, it is not long before the reader develops an awareness of certain smokescreens—how we sit on the ‘audience’ side of the dividing line, and that the poet is toying with us with selective truths, unreliable narratives, plot twists, and deliberately planted red herrings: ‘such a buttery trick’ (‘Soliloquy’ p60). We are left questioning what is real and what is part of the act.

Reality, and the assumptions we make, are challenged. There is a visceral nature to this poetry. The body becomes a vehicle for acting, a vessel for emotions, and a vestibule for hurt and harm. Beauty standards are conversely seized and shed; the source of vanity, power and revulsion.

…the only option to show you
what I mean is to expose my midriff. … – stroking
my bloated abdomen and thinking about how you
wore singlets to bed to hide your tummy – we both
knew it existed … I will gorge – bare
my guts in actions you cannot disrupt while my
digestive tract is processing, and I am full of shit.
(‘Elegy / my affliction’ p38)

There is a curious interplay between the body, embodiment, and disembodiment. In ‘Form, like body, should never be assumed’ (p37), Royal writes:

…a nightie is a throat, deeply penetrated
if assuming that there is a throat
for the ground to tenderly stroke over–
as opposed to being lifted from
the ground, up past the feet,
supposing there are feet and a ground.

It is reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado’s bizarrely disembodied characters in ‘Her Body and Other Parties’, oozing a surreal sensuality and eroticism. Later, the poet/actor asks herself:

After having my make-up prepared for filming – I often peer into the mirror and ask the shining surface if it is my insatiable greed which motivates me towards such youthful casting, or simply my wish to embody anyone but myself.
(‘Timeless Beauty’ pp22-23)

Here, as in many of Royal’s poems, acting becomes a form of masking – both physically and metaphorically – of stepping out of the flawed, damaged, or vulnerable parts of oneself, and choosing the armour of reinvention.

A thematic thread woven to great effect in The Drama Student is the warp and weft of costuming. Indeed, the first poem in the first ‘scene’ of this collection opens with: ‘It’s time to dress your body in this unrevised final draft’ (‘Raising a subject’ p5). There’s a dressing-gown cloaking shoulders and a nylon neck piece in ‘Acting in awe’ (pp12-13), ‘Form, like body, should never be assumed’ (p37) gives us a stained nightie, a shoulder strap, and rumours knotted like fabric, ‘On lucidity’ (p41) offers an entire top-loader full of dresses draped across a foldable clothes horse ‘skirting fragile textures’. ‘Nightgown slips’ (p45) examines: ‘silk submerge(d) in a silver tub of tepid water…agitation shaped by human touch’ and ‘the way language immeasurably clings even when whispered or delicately cut’. ‘Considered in relation to’ (p50) adds to the wardrobe more nighties (a prized nightie, at that) and:

…the fluid fall of the ruddy gown, so slept
in, so worn–with its low-scooped neckline, so low
and so scooped…

whilst introducing ‘the ultimate activewear basic, a must-have accessory in your workout wardrobe’. ‘Soliloquy’ (pp59-63) describes inhabiting a character’s backstory by ‘devot[ing] months to dressing in her clothes and wearing wigs in her exact hair colour and texture’. And ‘Materials list’ (pp26-27) gives us a profusion of fabric, mesh, pockets, a dress, and sleeves. The poet articulates her intent:

I want these words to thicken – to form a cloth case for the bolster
stuffed with denial. No adequate substitute
has ever been found for felt and this end line is fabrication.

The permeability of mesh makes a repeated cameo in this collection. From its initial appearance as ‘mesh patterns and a need to touch’ (‘Materials list’ p26), to ‘a mesh with many situated beginnings’ (‘On lucidity’ p41), right through to the closing image: ‘in full mesh I will gallop’ (‘Soliloquy’ p63), which also, in its layered meaning, gives the faithful stainless steel clothes horse first spotted in ‘On lucidity’ a reprisal.

The ‘Interlude’ is a dreamlike series of vignettes punctuating Scenes One and Two. Titled ‘Approaching a bedside table’ I, II, and III respectively, these palate cleansers are again reminiscent of Machado’s writing—in this instance, her memoir ‘In the Dream House’, where a series of micro-chapters each reframe the central relationship through a different voice and lens. So too does Royal’s bedside table get repositioned, repurposed, and reframed, each micro-scene shifting in cadence.

The final section, ‘Scene Two’, contains a multitude of intertextual pieces. This gathers force, amplifying with the closing soliloquy in ‘Encore’—a text-dense intertextual masterpiece leapfrogging between ideas and segueing from source references to responses then catapulting into rapid-fire word associations that sling one thought into the stream-of-conscious next:

Wistful music plays as a dentist reminds me to floss after he pulls out my prized tooth. I ask him if you can ever really wash away memories from your mouth? My grandfather’s teeth. I have smelt the horrid breath of lost lovers as I kiss them all good night – tasting a mouth giving over to another mouth as shallow pools form. A brick drops from the ceiling landing next to my feet – reminding me to remind myself that I am an idiot. This word means a lot to me. I have been called it many times. Me and my idiocy are very close. We finish each other’s sentences. I express this through screaming–and what is the point of screaming without receiving the appropriate level off attention? asks Panda Wong. I seek attention by cradling my chin with my hands – a form of preciseness of what I, myself am seeking. I told you – I warned you. I am an idiot.
‘Soliloquy’ (pp59-63)

Too often, when intertextual references are invoked, the source material is left to do much of the heavy lifting whilst sitting on the surface without being properly folded into the batter. Not so with Royal’s work. Whilst the cast list of the closing poem reads like a Who’s Who of great poets, writers, and thinkers, what is remarkable is that each quote is purposefully selected and seamlessly integrated into the fresh work, thus earning its place.

The Drama Student is an utter delight of a collection that razzle dazzles in all the right places. It is tactile, performative poetry that is felt, absorbed, and experienced on a multi-sensory level, where emotions enter tangible dimensions and may become something ‘I shawl over my knees’ (‘Catwalk’ p17). Ever the entertainer, Royal raises chuckles with the wry tone and breezy appeal of the bombastic, sardonic, and melodramatic (‘(Regarding) the pain of others’ pp42-43). However, beyond the craft and showmanship, we see softer glimmers – ‘the stains of violence our intimacy provokes’ (‘Leaf-shadow’ p44). It is this breadth and versatility of character and role that is compelling. As the curtains close, are we really any closer to knowing who this enigmatic poet-actress is? She has left us suspended in our suspense. Cue applause.

 
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

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.