The Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

ISBN 9781761269875

Pan Macmillan

Reviewed by AZ COSGROVE

The main thing you need to know about Dylin Hardcastle’s Language of Limbs (2024) is that it’s bloody beautiful. I’m not the first to say that it will be a classic in queer literature, and I won’t be the last. Hardcastle’s prose is breathtaking: lyrical and edgy. And it is language that holds up to very heavy subject matter — which is unavoidable in a book, set during the AIDs crisis in the historically volatile 1970s and 80s. I should probably warn you that reading this book will hurt, especially if you happen to identify as queer or love someone who does. It deals with extreme queer phobia, the violent lineage of Mardis Gras—historical wounds that have barely healed. You’ll probably cry. My advice: allow for tea breaks and, if you can, have a dog ready to pat.

Language of Limbs begins in Newcastle, where we meet two mirrored characters referred to as Limb One and Limb Two. On the same night, these characters both come face to face with their same-sex attraction to their best friends —but while Limb One refuses to continue to lead a life hostile to this facet of their identity, Limb Two chooses to suppress this part of themself and to live out the comparatively charmed heteronormative narrative available to them. The rest of the novel continues with this couplet structure, with alternating ‘Limb One’ or ‘Limb Two’ chapters written from the perspective of the eponymous character.

As they grow from teenagers to young adults, Limb One is immersed in the queer culture from which Limb Two repeatedly turns away. They endure the unimaginable losses of the AIDS crisis while for Limb Two this remains peripheral, a narrowly dodged bullet.

This structure is unconventional, and it takes us a moment to get used to before it starts to work—but when it does, it is incredibly effective. The structure allows complex issues—like internalised queer phobia, the lack of intersectionality in the queer community, and the nuanced relationship between trauma and art—to be explored from multiple angles, giving the book a unique dimensionality. Hardcastle has said that the idea for the narrative structure came from a conversation with a friend about “how almost kissing is sometimes hotter than actually kissing,” which led them to wonder: “what would it look like to have two lives just almost kissing?” (1). The structure functions to constantly remind us to connect the individual lives we are reading about to something larger: the metaphorical “body” which is the only context within which “limbs” make sense. However, many have noted that the narrative complexity could perhaps be off-putting to some readers.

I found that while it started and ended strongly, the narrative sagged somewhat in the middle. This corresponds exactly with the mysterious and compelling slippage between the two storylines. At the beginning of the novel, it’s unclear as to whether Limb One and Two are different people or alternative, ‘sliding door’ versions of the same, , and this ambiguity hooks the reader. The chilling internal dialogue ‘I think I might die here’ (3, 10) appears in both stories, and details like apricot chicken (15, 19), and the copy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in the school library (19, 23) pop up in both stories and take on a ghostly resonance. Such repetitions largely vanish in the middle of the book, when the lives of the characters diverge so significantly that any connection between them feels tenuous at best. There is a resurgence of these shared experiences at the end of the book, but by this point the narratives of the two limbs are so distinct that the device feels almost perfunctory. But whilst I think the structure might have been better sustained, this is a small criticism. 

Some have also observed that the Limb One chapters were more engaging to read, but as a criticism it doesn’t hold much weight, because the difference between these characters is exactly the point. Limb One has their coffee ‘strong, black no sugar’(53) and this is consistent with their personification as direct and unapologetic, while Limb Two is more careful, tentative. They study hard, get a scholarship and a boyfriend, and even in electric moments of collective action, instinctively recoil (66) when Limb One dives into the fray. On the sentence level, imagery of being ‘turned inside out’ recurs again and again in the Limb One chapters (3, 74, 137), Limb Two balks at this state of absolute vulnerability, instead choosing to remain, to extrapolate on the image, with skin facing outwards. ‘It’s easier this way,’ (13) they tell us. These characters come to represent two sides of the same conceptual coin, subtly different, in a way similar to how fresh blood differs from a day-old bruise, or the way that falling asleep is different to being knocked out.

Further, I think it could be argued that the Limb Two storyline represents a more nuanced perspective that is arguably more applicable today, when hatred has become more insidious, harder to define—when often it exists in glinting eyes, in sharp toothed smiles and sodden, dripping silences. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek distinguishes this quieter form of violence as “subjective” rather than “objective” (2). In Language of Limbs, Limb Two manages to escape the explicit, physical acts of violence—spilled blood, broken bones—that plague Limb One’s story, but is never able to escape what she has chosen to suppress:

‘I nod. Swallow and feel the memory pushed back under. Sunk down. As her face resettles on the ocean floor of my body, I feel the strangle of disgust loosen.’
(195)

The list of other things I loved about this book is long, too long to fully recount here, but I will expand briefly on a few. I loved the unapologetically Australian tone—in the opening chapters, we encounter suburban backyard barbecues (15), Arnott’s family biscuits (22), flowering gumtrees (10), and high school hookups in the back of a Ford Falcon (29). I also loved the poignant and nuanced of different relationships to art: while Limb One develops a career of art making, Limb Two finds their strength in ‘picking at and teasing apart sentences, extrapolating, like a miner sieving earth for gold’ (97) and becomes an editor, highlighting the interesting relationship between artistic practice and the internal. I also loved the unrelentingly visceral imagery used throughout the book—quotes like ‘I feel as if my lungs are on fire, like I might, in a moment, smell the reek of my muscle burning’ (74) create a consistently “embodied” reading experience that nicely complements the broader conceptual framework.

I began this review by telling you that Language of Limbs is beautiful—and it really is. The prose that Hardcastle uses is simply extraordinary. It is writing that’s simultaneously rich with metaphors but also tastefully restrained. While the imagery is dense with the figurative, it never feels flowery or confusing. Take this quote, describing the sudden influx of the AIDs crisis into ‘Uranian House’, the queer haven where Limb One lives:

‘Uranian House opens its door and those who are drowning wash in, drenched and shaken. We give them towels and chicken soup and wait, anxiously, for the blue to fade from their flesh.’
(92)

However, while I loved this lyrical, poetic writing, this prose style coupled with the heavy themes can become a bit hard to get through. See my aforementioned tips re: tea and dogs. 

But that’s about it for my “cons” list. Safe to say, I liked this book. Language of Limbs is blisteringly intelligent, lyrical, and masterful in its execution.

Or, as I keep telling people in my real life: Really bloody good.

 Cited

1. DYLIN HARDCASTLE: Gay Liberation Is Indebted To Blak Trans Women on Podcast: It’s A Lot with Abbie Chatfield •Sea. 7 Ep. 6
2. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, New York: Picador, 2008

Not Telling

by Alison J. Barton

Puncher & Wattmann

Reviewed by ANTHEA YANG

In Not Telling, Alison J. Barton paints an expansive portrait of memory, family, culture and the personal and collective grief and trauma caused by the colonisation of Australia. Weaving through the collection’s three main sections, and binding the themes together, is the concept and interrogation of language — how it has been used to silence Aboriginal history and how it can be reclaimed to enable truth-telling. The idea of muteness, whether by choice (secret-keeping as a form of protection of heritage) or force (the erasure of cultural narratives), is a recurring motif throughout the collection, and the title itself, Not Telling, places the possibilities and powers of language and storytelling back into the hands of Aboriginal peoples. In ‘The phases of psychoanalysis’, Barton suggests the act of reclaiming language, of speaking truth, allows for personal and collective history to live on beyond:

‘speech is the end to mortality
a place for hiding fragments’
(p.28)

The first of three sections, ‘Wild garments’ maps the effects of trauma on the body through a myriad of environments the speaker interacts with. From place to place, the poet creates a sense of movement through time and memory that gives emphasis to how trauma can cause exterior and interior worlds to coalesce, blurring the physical and psychological. In ‘I pass winter driving to my mother’s house’, Barton explores this through a complex mother-daughter relationship: 

‘when we say goodbye
I wilt practise grief
she    in her heavily unmedicated state
  we
          like two drops of water meeting on glass’
(p.17)

In ‘Birth dress’, the physicality of the book becomes interchangeable with the body: ‘this book will become strained, a weight’. Many of the poems titles in this section are grounded in physical objects or places: ‘Birth dress’, ‘Diary’, ‘the piano’, ‘Turner Contemporary, Margate’, ‘Marseille, winter’. The materiality of these titles ground the speaker and the reader is given a personal history of her. Perhaps it is in this way that the past is called into the present (from ‘Turner Contemporary Margate’: ‘I am tethered to where you left me.’). In ‘Diary’ and ‘Damned Honey’, Barton examines how one moves between the past, present and future through language. What happens when language fails? Or when language has no place to go? 

‘I am worse for asking. I grip questions so tight that my tied heart told me not to and broke stories of silent families in cement. We bridge the night.’
(‘Diary’ p.4)

‘…came so close to telling but restless & still I was steadfast, unrecognisable / we know a tale we can never say, hold a treasure no one can hear’ 
(‘Damned Honey’ p.7)

Again in ‘A verb found’, Barton shows that the limitations of language caused by the invasion of Australia creates a sense of disconnection and dislocation between the speaker and her history: 

‘in speak
we find each other or we do not
no window, no door’
(p.14)

Throughout the collection, Barton’s use of punctuation is selective and intentional. The lack of punctuation allows for the poems to move freely between each other. There is never a sharp ending, only a continuation. This sense of flow speaks to the collectivism and longevity of Aboriginal culture — it is multiplicitous and enduring. In the poems where punctuation is present, Barton uses this to create a sense of formality or junction. How does personal and collective trauma affect the physical state and what becomes of the body in these moments? In ‘Admitted’, Barton uses the sparseness of language combined with punctuated sentences to create the cold and clinical environment the speaker is in:

‘Flocked on wheels, I am an object stilted on a rolling bed. I am a body minus arrest — flawed, frail, efface, small. I am for observation, summoned by medicine, science uninterrupted.’
(p.5)

The second section of the collection, ‘Dreamscape psychobabble’, is a continuous exploration of the blurring of boundaries between the physical and the psychological—the speaker is ‘hunting beyond constructed and re-constructed borders’ (from ‘The phases of psychoanalysis’). ‘Dreamscape psychobabble’ works as a smooth transition from the themes of family and trauma explored in ‘Wild garments’, moving into a deeper and more theoretical interrogation of how history and trauma informs the present self. Barton weaves psychoanalytic theory with dream analysis to strip back the layers of one’s past and explore different versions of selves. In the opening poem, ‘I count in dreams of houses’, the ‘I’ presents itself as both a fluid and solid state that is moving through the dreamscape. Recounting the tangible, the imagery is rich—yet the self feels intangible: 

‘I hike through stories of the self
I measure stares in movement
I carry heavy steps in my hands burdened by what’s behind eyes’
(p.27)

The gaze and seeing are concepts that are present throughout the poems in this section, tying together both what dreams and psychoanalysis allows for: ways of seeing the self from whole and fragmented perspectives. This is explored in two poems:

‘The work is in the repetition
the wrong way around      gaze      imaginary      Other
you not you’ 
(‘The phases of psychoanalysis’ p.28)

‘reminding myself that I am lost the closer I get to him
we gaze into each other as ourselves
we are addiction        it feels good, like the new drinking

….

Lacan’s delusion is that history is without patient
I keep my secrets knowing nothing, becoming illness’
(‘This is the poem of the moment’ p. 46-47)

Barton plays with form, working with the spaces on the page to build on imagery and silence, and to explore the different shapes that language, grief and trauma can take. As we move through the book, there is a sense that the poems are becoming more and more fragmented in form. By the time the reader reaches the end of the third and final section, ‘Buried light’, the words become increasingly scattered. This fragmentation speaks to the displacement of identity, history and memory of Aboriginal peoples caused by colonialism. But, however dispossessed, Barton addresses and celebrates the resilience of Aboriginal tradition and culture through history, highlighting the importance of preserving connection to community, land and Country. In the section’s titular poem, Barton draws connection between trauma, family and heritage, reclaiming cultural history through language: 

‘we were bound by an era
by registers of speech
we made the shape of eagles
with our hands
and summoned our injuries

we spoke with foreign mouths
as if burying light
with forged blades

by rough white skies
we found ancestors together
in our talk’
(‘buried light’, p. 55)

This reclamation is cemented in the provision of factual accounts and documentation of Aboriginal history, which Barton reveals in ‘Wealth for toil’, a powerful redaction letter from Francis Tuckfield, and also in ‘taper’, which speaks to the years of silencing Aboriginal peoples and the harrowing trauma resulting from the Stolen Generations: 

‘for the life of you
and the life of me imprisoned
dragged in dirt
head open
locked cuffs
hands chained
legs jagged

children ripped
     from screaming arms

taper to
                  silence
                      weighted between the sound and the denial’
(p. 58–59)

The disintegration of colonial language paves the way for a decolonised way of speaking. One that allows room for remembering and truth-telling. In the beginning of ‘no site for hunting’, we see the speaker unable to move in either direction of time, stuck in colonial narrative: 

‘I/you de-subjectify myself/me
in the end the beginning of the body
doubts itself in both directions’ 
(p. 62)

But later in the poem, is freed through the language of ‘murmuring women’: 

‘I speak and my body releases
a trapped bird
we are singular living organism
we are the earth breathing’ 
(‘no site for hunting’, p. 63)

This connection to Country is what returns the speaker to herself. In the very first poem of the collection, the book is an extension of the body (‘strained, a weight’), and here the body is an extension of the land (‘my continent a mind and body’, from ‘because the butterfly’). In addition to connection to the land, Barton writes in connection and conversation with Aboriginal writers such as Alison Whittaker, Alexis Wright and Jeanine Leanne, and in doing so, the book becomes — like the body and like the land — a living thing. The final poem in the collection, ‘as we are’, connects the themes explored throughout the three sections together. Barton’s endurance to holding these expansive themes in conversation with, and in exploration of, each other to the very end results in not only a spectacular reading experience but a powerful and nuanced recollection of the Aboriginal experience. Although the end usually conveys a sense of finality, ‘as we are’ presents itself as an open-ended poem: the work of decolonising, of working through trauma, of understanding the possibilities of language to overcome cultural voicelessness, is not done. This captures the essence of Not Telling. 

‘the mythscape alive and breathing

storytellers

break
grow
plait’
(‘as we are’, p.79)
ANTHEA YANG is a writer and poet living on unceded Wurundjeri land. She co-edited the anthology Resilience and was a recipient of the Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2023 

Framed

By Nishi Pulugurtha

PenPrints

ISBN 9788198156464

Reviewed by SAFA SHARFUDEEN

There are times when we fall into a reading slump where long novels feel too daunting, and we struggle to find the energy or the time to engage with a book. Framed, a collection of eleven short stories by Nishi Pulugurtha, is the perfect remedy for such moments. A lighthearted read, it offers glimpses into small yet significant experiences of everyday life.

Nishi Pulugurtha brings her keen insight, observations and quiet sensitivity to this collection. The stories unravel the beauty of ordinary moments, exploring themes such as love, loss, family, and tradition with a gentle yet profound voice.

The collection feature eleven short stories: “Framed”, “Sitting Out”, “Dinner Party”, “Matters of the Eye”, “Kali”, “The Verandah”, “Pulling Along”, Mobile Phone Recordings”, “Little Star”, “Sounds”, and “The Harmonium”.

Each story in the book offers a distinct perspective, narrator, and style, which contributes to the anthology’s overall diversity and appeal. Some tales delve into introspection, while others adopt a more observational tone, as if we are quietly witnessing the characters go through their lives.

“Pulling Along” highlights the struggles people faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows that while the situation was very tough for everyone, individual experiences varied depending on the financial circumstances. As I read the story, I could clearly see how my own experience during the pandemic was quite different from what the characters went through. Though the story was not overly dramatic or complex, it made me realise and reflect deeply on people’s struggles, hardships and the importance of holding on to hope.

In contrast, “Dinner Party” employs an observational narrative style and tone that captures the subtle complexities of human relationships through casual conversations and unspoken tensions. I won’t give any spoilers, but this was one of my favourite stories in the book because of how effortlessly it portrayed the aspects of family dynamics, marriage and friendships without explicitly stating emotions that allows the readers to infer deeper meanings through character interactions and small details. The ending, though understated, carried a powerful message proving my point that it had a profound effect of subtle storytelling.

The book also beautifully captures the essence of human existence through brief, transient moments. One key takeaway from this collection is that life consists of seemingly simple moments that reveal profound significance with closer observations.

In “The Verandah”, the third person narrative beautifully mimics human perception. In real life, we don’t just experience the world from our own perspective. We also observe others, interpret their emotions, and make assumptions about their thoughts. The story has a simple plot but evokes a strong sense of nostalgia for the pandemic and lockdown time period that was challenging for everyone due to the limited social interactions. Since meeting new people and engaging with others is essential for personal growth, the isolation made life difficult. The use of third person narrative enhances the experience and storytelling by reflecting how we naturally observe and understand the world. It connects a character’s inner thoughts with their actions, making the reading experience feel natural and immersive.

Pulugurtha highlights the notion that our observations— of individuals, places, customs, and feelings— inform our perceptions of the world. Her narratives are not sweeping tales of dramatic events or occurrences but gentle and tender mediations on daily life, inviting readers to explore and discover beauty in the ordinary moments of life.

Her themes explore familial relationships, cultural traditions, and evolving lifestyles. One of the most captivating elements of the book is its untranslated words in Telugu and Bengali. These words evoke the culture and traditions of particular places. This invites readers to explore and fully immerse themselves in the cultural context of the story. The addition of a glossary is a considerate feature that enhances the global participation of audiences while maintaining cultural authenticity. This decision underscores how language and culture are intertwined and even if the text is written in English, certain elements and words are best preserved in their original form.

Pulugurtha’s narrative style is primarily a descriptive one, that emphasises everyday observations. She refrains from imposing conclusions or strong arguments. Instead, she encourages readers to derive their own interpretations from the stories. Her writing is straightforward and simple, filled with moments of quiet reflection.

In the story the “Little Star”, the child’s simple way of telling the story creates a contrast between what they understand and what the reader understands. This difference adds depth to the story, as readers can see a deeper meaning behind the child’s words and actions. The straightforward narration keeps things clear and honest, without over complicating events or emotions. Since children view the world differently without biases or complexities as adults do, their perceptions feel raw and genuine, making the story more powerful and emotionally compelling.

The stories are excellent at transforming the ordinary into something meaningful and remarkable. Pulugurtha doesn’t rely on dramatic plot twists or heavy philosophical references or discussions. Rather, she encourages the reader to pause, observe, and cherish life’s subtle moments.

In ‘Framed’, a familiar ritual and tradition are presented from a fresh perspective and narrator permitting readers to reflect on the theme of loss. Despite dealing with the serious subject of death, the story avoids dramatic narration or intense events. Instead, its subtle moments draw attention to the words, characters, and the emotional atmosphere it creates.

The interesting aspect of the book is that, when stories require intensity to capture attention, this anthology reminds us that you can even explore the gentleness of everyday life. It is just simple.

While this book may not have challenging beliefs or unveil shocking truths, it provides an equally satisfying feeling of warmth, nostalgia and celebrating the small joys in life. Framed is ideal for readers who appreciate reflective, slice of life narratives. If you enjoy stories that delve into human emotions and relationships in a quiet yet impactful manner, you will find Framed to be a true delight. For those looking to ease back into their reading with short, captivating pieces, these stories encapsulate the universal sense of human experiences that we all encounter in our lives.
 
 
SAFA SHARFUDEEN is a master’s student in English at the University of Madras with a deep passion for literature, writing and teaching. She also worked as the compiler and editor of “When the Moon Drowns in Waves”, collaborating with multiple writers and has interned for journals and publications.

Dr Pip Newling reads and writes on unceded Dharawahl Country. She has published memoir and essays, including Knockabout Girl (Harper Collins, 2007).

I watched the May flooding of the Manning River from a distance, with childhood memories of rain and water and disappearing islands, of the power of a deluge running beneath my days.

Peaking at 6.40m on Thursday 22 May, this inundation of the Manning was being called a 1-in-500- year flood and reached much higher than the 1929 flood peak of 5.97m, the previous record for the highest ever flood on the river.

Image 1: The Manning River looking west at Tinonee, upstream
of Taree Credit: Harrison Reed (Global News), Wednesday 21 May 2025

The Lower Manning, all the river islands and alluvial rich river flats spreading out either side of the water course from Taree to the sea, was some of the earliest settled land in the Manning Valley by white settlers in the 1830s.

What these settlers saw was the constant fresh water, the rich soil replenished by flooding, and the mild weather – not too hot in summer, not too cold in winter. And the land was their’s for the taking, so they thought. These settlers appraised the land with a completely different set of visions, values and desires to the Biripi people they met as they cut down trees, re-routed water drainage across the land, changing water tables and flows, and brought cattle, sheep and fences to the district.

These settlers knew they could make livelihoods and legacy out of the land, straightforwardly and consistently, by transplanting their farming knowledge from Scotland and England. Floods, fires, drought were just another part of doing business. They prayed for – imagined – good seasons, many children and longevity.

The Manning River is a ‘double delta’ river, with two mouths to the Tasman Sea. The northern mouth lies between Manning Point and Harrington and the southern sits at Farquhar Inlet at the end of the white strip of sand of the ‘Old Bar’.

It has a very long history of floods.

The 1840 flood was the first big one recorded by white settlers, ‘A very heavy flood occurred in 1840, which converted the flats into one great one.’(1)

The next flood of note was in 1866.

But by 1866, there were well over 3,000 people in the Lower Manning, blacksmiths, boat builders, shopkeepers, postmasters, clergymen from various Churches, and schoolteachers, all calling Taree home. The impact of this flood was much more significant on humans, property and communities.

Many of these people were the first climate refugees to arrive in the Valley. They travelled across the world from Scotland, due to a string of challenging weather seasons, to settle in the Hunter Valley around Newcastle. They established dairy farms and grew crops, and then, what we now refer to as La Niña, brought a string of wet years from 1860. Switching to an El Niño event in 1864, bringing drought conditions, many settlers moved again, to the Manning.

Our contemporary communities are much more aware of these swings and patterns in weather, or at least their nomenclature, but we seem unable to imagine the worsening and compounding of severity and impact these forces bring due to a warming planet. Or acknowledge the practices that increase the warming.

The 1866 flood was a mid-winter flood that began with a rainstorm across the valley from the mountains to the sea with gale force winds uprooting trees and damaging building on top of the destruction of the crops, stock and houses swept out to sea. The ‘islands in the lower valleys were all but submerged and Cundle Plains was a ‘sea of water’.(2) Peaking over night on Friday 13 July, the river rose quickly and powerfully. In nine hours the water rose twenty feet.(3) Over 6 metres in metric.

Rivers with multiple natural mouths are rare. The only other river in the world with two naturally occurring mouths is the River Nile. New settlers on the river in 1866, didn’t believe that Mitchell Island was an island until the Farquhar Inlet, the southern mouth, ‘broke open’ during the flood. (4) The inability to imagine the river’s full character was misguided and dangerous then and is now.

From 1867 through to 1872, there were major floods every year. This turn of events left the whole Valley, but the Lower Manning community, Taree and below in particular, feeling despondent. Horace Dean, the Editor of the Manning River News, described the mood in an editorial of 7 January 1871: ‘Swollen creeks, weedy crops, damp houses, muddy thoroughfares, delayed mails, cross house-keepers, long faced husbandsmen, wheezing children – these are again looming upon us, as if such repeated visitations were not enough to drive the best natured people like ourselves to some deed of desperation.’

Six years of floods. You would think we would remember this. That these years would have travelled down in some kind of collective memory or Valley DNA. But no. Not for the white settlers who have continued building lives, livelihoods and communities in the Manning.

The years 1927 and 1928 were hard dry years for the Valley, especially the Lower Manning where, by then, dairy farms numbered in the hundreds. The land cracked and crops withered. The droughts crippled the economy of the Valley and so, when it began to rain on Monday 18 February 1929, the relief was palpable. The days were still hot, and the humidity rose as the rain continued. One reporter wrote that, ‘Ten inches of rain have fallen since Monday afternoon to Thursday night and all the world is gay.’(5)

But the rain fell in the upper tributaries of the Manning as well, and soon the river swelled powerfully, breaking banks and taking stock, fences, wharves. By Saturday night, the mark that told the height of the 1866 flood on the Bank of NSW building in the centre of town was covered by two feet of water.

As with the current flood, people had to be rescued from Taree Estate, Glenthorne, and the islands further down stream. Two people died. There were reports of Harrington people, living at the entrance to the sea, watching stock, pigs and cows and horses, swept straight out into the Tasman Sea on a continuous torrent of swirling mud and water, haystacks, dressing tables, beds, back doors all disappearing into the churning ocean. Dumaresq Island was completely covered by water and, as the floodwaters retreated, cattle were found hanging stranded in trees along the Island’s banks.

The drought had lightened the grip the farmers had on the earth and the flood washed topsoil, and several more layers besides that, down the now widened channels of the river.

Just as now, once the waters had receded the mud was everywhere. In houses, shops, dairies, through machinery and cars. The clean up was a mammoth task. The stench was awful; it always is after a flood. Mud clings to everything and smells rotten and old as though something ancient has been vomited up by the river. The layer of mud was so great in the worst affected areas that winter crops couldn’t be planted. The silt just bakes onto the grass, killing it all.

But the Valley slowly recovered. The alluvial flats were renewed. Life by the river continued and the feats of water, escape and survival became part of the folklore of the town:

Fancy nearly a mile of telegraph line swept down through farms here. Fancy having to wrench the iron roof off to escape into a flood boat.(6)

My flood was the 1978 flood. It was the biggest in my childhood, in my living memory. In 1978 the water came all the way up to the corner of the main street, Victoria, and Pulteney Street, filling the road. Victoria Street was the Pacific Highway route then, and the road was cut, isolating Taree. Houses in Taree Estate and further down stream had water up to their ceilings. The brown swirl crept up the banks and filled the Rowing Club, the Sailing Club and spilled up into the parking areas that dotted the riverside. Rapidly rising and then edging into town, it stopped eventually at 5.45 metres on the gauge at the Martin Bridge. All of Taree Estate was flooded, as were parts of Glenthorne across the river and Dumaresq Island. The Lower Manning flood plain was flowing with water. The second mouth, Farqhuar’s Inlet at Old Bar, usually choked with sand, burst.

“It’s only from up in the air you can see it – it’s indescribable,” said the then Manning Shire President, Councillor Ray Gillogy, after taking a tour in an RAAF helicopter.(7)

My stand out memory from that flood is that the town swimming pool, built on the riverbank, was underwater, overflowing with murky brown water. It was where I spent much of my time, swimming laps, mucking around. The river had come up over the fence of the pool and swept branches of trees and rubbish and, as I remember it, a dead Guernsey cow into it. The carcass, its white patches still white, was floating on its back, four skinny legs stiff and stuck straight up in the air. It moved in the current, buffeted against the fence. ‘There’s a dead cow in the pool!’

Image 2: The Manning in flood, the view from the swimming pool,
17-18 March 1978

A few years ago, I spent some time focused on Taree and the Manning Valley, working through my love-hate relationship with the place. I spoke to a great number of people about their memories and feelings about the town, the Valley, the people. Many of those conversations have remained with me. Biripi, Worimi, non-Aboriginal and newly minted residents of the Valley all shared their different relationships to the place with me.

One of those conversations sits top of mind. One Biripi Elder told me:

The river hasn’t changed… The mountains haven’t changed.
The sea hasn’t changed. There might be a new street or two,
but the river hasn’t changed. (8)

His comment chimes loudly because this history is what we know in our bones. We live by the river because we love the river, in our own way. But we whitefellas choose to embrace a forgetting, a not-knowing pretence that gets us through to the next good season.

Look at the aerial photos from May of the Manning River. See the wide swathe of milky brown water and sludge, the sweep that traces the old flood plains, the old river channels. The river remembers. This expanse and stretch and flow is what the river knows. This flood – like all the previous floods – is a flex, a forecast of what will come, of what has always been possible.

First Nations oral histories told of floods and land inundation dating back to 10,000 years, when the sea levels rose dramatically at the end of the last ice age. Correlated and supported by linguists, geographers and geologists, these stories come from communities around Australia and tell of people having to leave significant areas for higher ground due to flood.

Now in a climate emergency and collapse, it is on us to both remember and imagine. And also to listen. To learn from what has happened in this land before our times.

There is another photo from the 1978 flood of the Manning River that I have been thinking about too – it’s a photo of a fox marooned by water hanging onto to a fence post for dear life. I can’t help but think this is our current, our future status if we don’t pay attention.

Image 3: A fox stranded in the 1978 flood,
17-18 March 1978.

I acknowledge the Biripi people of the Manning, the First Peoples of this land, and pay my respects to Elders past and present and celebrate their continual presence in the Valley. I recognise the deep knowledge and spiritual connection they have to the lands and seas on which I grew up. The Valley is unceded land and always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

(1) The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 October 1873
(2) Birrell 1987, p. 137
(3) The Wingham Chronicle and Manning River Observer, 12 February 1929 p. 3
(4) Fitzpatrick 1914, p. 119
(5) Port Macquarie News and Hastings River Advocate, 23 February 1929
(6) Port Macquarie News and Hastings River Advocate, 23 February 1929
(7) The Manning River Times, 17-18 March 1978
(8) #5, recorded interview 2012

Images:
Facebook, Thursday 22 May (credit unknown)
The Manning River Times online
The Manning River Times online

The copyright of the 1978 flood photos has been sought but no information was available. Any updates welcome.

Monsoon Seems Promising This Year

By Rudra Pati

Tristoop

Translated from Bengali by Matralina Pati

Reviewed by NITHYA ELIZABETH SAM

Rudra Pati’s Monsoon Seems Promising This Year is a heartfelt journey through the life of marginalized farmers in the village of Manbhum. The drought-prone Purulia region of Manbhum lies to the extreme west of West Bengal, bordering Jharkhand. It is a hilly area with red laterite soil, which often makes the land rocky and infertile. The extreme climate and the water bodies that dry up in summers mark the tough fate of farming and tribal communities that reside there. Pati’s poetry collection acts as a window to rural life and practices while inviting the reader to empathize with the farmers. The seventy-one poems, originally written in Bengali and translated to English by Matralina Pati, successfully capture the essence of rural existence and cultural depth. The reader becomes a participant in the poems and by the end of the collection, we are no strangers to the scorching heat, the relief of rain, the weight of exhaustion and the inevitable grip of poverty, all of which are blended into their life in Manbhum.

Life and nature are deeply intertwined in Pati’s poetry, as he challenges conventional ideas through his portrayal of nature. In the opening poem, ‘Imprints’, the plight of the trees mirrors the farmers’ lives. Manbhum’s experience of deforestation under colonial rule, provides more meaning to the lines,

The injured tree, too,
Nurses her wounds in secrecy.
Her vengeful hungers thrive
In the obscure recesses
Of her strong deep roots.
(p 20)

The destruction caused for resource extraction and revenue generation had a long term impact on the tribal communities who were economically exploited and suppressed. Rains became a reason for celebration with the lingering sense of uncertainty. Visual and auditory imageries in the poem bring us a unique reading experience. ‘The Long Days of Wait’ echoes the sound of a farmer’s breaking heart as a call for monsoon and ‘Protests’ metaphorically presents the struggle of plants against rain. It mirrors the forbearance of people confronting their struggles. Pati impressively captures the monotonous yet arduous life of farmers through his portrayal of daily routines and unforgiving conditions in lines like,

Beside the plough, the day
Dies a slow death.
(p 21)

These lines highlight how their days begin and end in the fields, marked by hard work and dedication. Additionally, Pati uses words and colours to paint the farmers’ lives, emphasizing how harsh climates do not break them, but continues as a part of their existence. Poverty gnaws at their lives, but they continue to endure, finding solace in prayer and the little moments of joy nature sometimes offers.

Matralina Pati’s translation deserves praise for preserving the vividness and authenticity of her father’s words. Through her careful choice of language, readers are transported into a world where nature is both a giver and a taker. Ruthless storms and unforgiving summers are portrayed as part of their daily lives, even when the “savage fun” of nature takes a toll on the farmers. Despite technological advancements, relief remains distant in their vision. The farmers’ parched lips and throats reflect the persistent challenges they face in a consumerist world. The farmers continue to struggle as power hubs and technological interventions fail to free them from their hardships. The farmers’ contributions to the nation often go unnoticed and they continue to face challenges due to long-standing neglect.

The poems act as a testament to the important role undertaken by women of the village. The poems capture everyday practices and rituals, showing women as caretakers, workers and spiritual anchors. The poet says that they light lamps, anoint conch shells and pray collectively while being active in the field as well. Themes of marriage, death and continuity are woven into his portrayal of rural life, emphasizing the role of women in shaping their community. Additionally, Pati questions the societal norms that celebrate the birth of a female calf but not a female child. This further examines the societal norms grounded around gender. The poet challenges the readers to break their biases and ponder on their perceptions of value and worth.

One of the central themes in the collection is the relationship between farmers and nature. In the poem, ‘The Pariah’, Pati draws a contrast between the city and the rural landscapes, portraying the village as a pariah within the nation. Pati masterfully depicts how the city overlooks the struggles of the village that feeds it, highlighting the alienation of farmers within their own country. Another poem, ‘The Tale of Sickly Exchange Card’, reaches out to the farmer’s dreams and aspirations that were shunned, running behind this vicious cycle of life. Pati reflects on it through the lines,

Through the innocent hands of children
My sickly exchange card has reached the sky.
(p 38)

This captures the fleeting hope that remains even during adversity. It also resonates with the farmers’ hope that someday, their efforts will bear fruit. In ‘Poetry from the Farmer’, Pati emphasizes the crucial role of farmers in sustaining the nation. The unpredictability of monsoons directly impacts not just the farmers but the entire country, a reality that often goes unnoticed. Religion and devotion become a source of comfort for the farmers in these situations. Even when faced with challenges, their power to maintain a smile, holding onto hope for the next generation is very well portrayed through the poems.

Pati’s poetry is not mere storytelling, rather it can be seen as a critique against the disparities and a platform to indulge and empathise. The vivid imagery that the poet employs, brings the rural landscape alive. The simple language remains a major factor of the poetry collection and it preserves the authenticity of the rural experience. These untranslated, culturally rooted words bring originality to the poems. Colours hold symbolic significance throughout the collection, as seen in the lines:

In a dream, the blue village gleams
With green light.
(p 50)

The lines convey the farmers’ dreams of a better life, while painting the rural aesthetic through words. One particularly moving poem, ‘We Both Pen Letters’ explores the inherited cycle of poverty. It becomes evident how the farmers’ lives follow repetitive patterns, passed down from parents to children. In ‘Acid, Acid’, Pati addresses industrialization’s impact on rural communities, highlighting issues of caste and untouchability. Through ‘An Introduction’, Pati reveals the struggles he faced during his futile job search and his family’s economic hardships. His words capture the helplessness of being educated yet unemployed. Despite this bitterness, a ray of hope persists as Pati envisions a future, where education and awareness will transform rural life.

The last three poems of the collection are extremely powerful and foster a strong hope for the next generation. Through the poem, Monsoon Seems Promising This Year, the poet manages to condense all the themes of the collection in one place. It embodies the fear, joy, longing, agitation, helplessness and the desire to protest against all the injustices. The poet shares his dream of retiring from poetry, once the voices that were stifled all these while rise to create a change. The closing poem, ‘Poetry from a Farmer for You’, carries a message of hope and resistance. Pati looks forward to the day when the city acknowledges the value of the village and the contributions of farmers. He says that neglecting rural communities is like binding the hands that feed us.

Ultimately, Monsoon Seems Promising This Year serves as an enlightening collection of poetry with a vision. Pati’s insightful portrayal of the farmers’ lives acts as an inspiration to readers to open their eyes to the spirit of rural communities. Purulia’s tale of struggle and survival resonates through the lines that capture the arid climate, abrupt harsh rains and vagueness of life. Even though the collection is bound to the region of Manbhum, it crosses geographical boundaries and reminds us of the universal struggles of those who labour to sustain the world. Pati’s poetry rooted in realism and raw emotion leaves its mark on readers, urging them to view rural life with empathy and respect.

NITHYA ELIZABETH SAM is an aspiring writer from Kerala, currently pursuing Master’s in English literature. Her passion lies in poetry and storytelling; to capture life in its essence.

Heartsease

Kate Kruimink

Picador

ISBN  9781761561955

Reviewed by NINA CULLEY
Some novels announce their ghosts; others let them quietly inhabit the edges. In Heartsease, the second novel by award winner Alice Kruimink, ghosts live on: in muscle memory, in unfinished conversations, in the residue of grief.

Where Kruimink’s debut, A Treacherous Country, explored the weight of colonial history in Tasmania, Heartsease —winner of the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier’s Prize for Fiction —is quieter and more fluid. The novel’s title borrows from Viola tricolor, a flower historically used to soothe heartache, famously referenced in a love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also the flower that Ellen (Nelly) Llewellyn—one of the novel’s narrators—is unknowingly given by her mother. The naming becomes emblematic of Kruimink’s central preoccupation: the gaps in memory, and how misrecognition can shape, strain, and sometimes redeem our most intimate relationships.

Set in present-day Hobart, Heartsease opens with Nelly—thirty-two, adrift, partial to Fruity Lexia and assisting her friend Josh with his artistic visions — on her way to a silent retreat in rural Tasmania. The trip, long-postponed, has been arranged with her older sister Charlotte (Lot), an employment lawyer and mother who has spent much of her adult life quietly caring for Nelly following the early death of their mother, Nina.

The retreat itself is an intriguing opening: Nelly arrives first and surveys the other participants, internally mocking the garish velvet upholstery and plastic apples, and leaving notes for Lot – ‘1. smell after rain ask Lot’; ‘2. Geraniums ask Lot,’ (p11). But the silent retreat, for all its symbolic potential, is soon abandoned once Lot arrives and the pair escape to a nearby pub (Nelly isn’t great at staying sober). It’s a curious narrative decision: Kruimink gives us a vivid setting and a cast of side characters, only to leave them behind.

And yet, I think I understand it. I did a silent retreat in Thailand in 2024, and for weeks afterwards I wrestled with how to translate the experience into something narrative or meaningful. But in hindsight, it wasn’t a story; it was a kind of holding space for interiority – one that doesn’t move the narrative forward but deepens the emotional experience. In Heartsease this remote location becomes a crucial point of departure—not only for Nelly and Lot, but later for Lot and Josh, who take a fractured road trip home, first in separate cars and eventually together, leaving two cars behind. One of these cars is Nelly’s—and by the third chapter, we know why: she has died.

It takes a moment to realise it. The narrative shifts suddenly. One minute you are reading Nelly’s candid first-person voice, the next you are in Lot’s more restrained third-person perspective, assembling fragments. It’s a devastating blow in that you lose not just a character but also a narrator; it’s a special kind of bereavement for readers. And a risky structural move, one that recalls the narrative handover in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) or the tonal pivot in Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (2015). Like Porter, Kruimink seems less interested in conventional plot than in the messy mechanics of mourning, and the way memory–subjective, recursive, unreliable–becomes its own form of storytelling.

Kruimink observes: ‘We don’t live linearly. I think we live partly in the present and a whole lot in the past, with an undercurrent of future always there.’ (1) This idea echoes what philosopher Henri Bergson called ‘durée’, a continuous, qualitative experience of time that defies the segmented chronology of clocks. Bergson, the son of a composer, believed that listening to music is the perfect model of durée in that it best illuminates time: ‘Duration is the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances.’(2) He wrote: ‘Our personality constantly sprouts, grows, and matures. Each of its moments is something new added onto what came before.’(3) Kruimink articulates this not just thematically but formally:

‘Time was beginning to congeal like hot sugar…And although the day had just been a day, full of its measure of twenty-four hours, now as we slid into night those hours had swollen like leeches at the vein and were dragging fatly by. Some forwards, some backwards.’ (p112).

Kruimink conveys the non-linear movement of memory through a layered narrative structure, allowing multiple timelines to emerge: one follows the sisters’ final trip together, another traces Lot’s reckoning in the days after Nelly’s death, and a third drifts between spectral presences—ghosts of the past (or glimpses of the future?) For instance, after leaving the retreat in search of a pub, Nelly has the uncanny sense that Josh has been in her room. Though confused by the feeling, she describes his presence as a ‘kind of new memory’ (p.154). Later, she reflects: The moment feels out of place—until later, after her death, when Josh returns to collect her belongings from her room, retroactively confirming her intuition.

As a teenager, Nelly attended what the novel calls a ‘special support school for troubled teens,’ where she jokes that the only thing she really learned was the Venn diagram. That image becomes a quiet, recurring symbol throughout the novel. The intersection—the slim overlap between two circles—represents the emotional space Nelly shares with those closest to her, particularly Lot, and occasionally Josh. It’s where their connection is strongest: over drinks, in humour, in memory. They often joke that they can read each other’s minds. But when they drift out of that shared centre—especially when their mother, Nina, comes up—the space between them grows. After disagreeing on the notion that nothing matters because ‘the sun’s going to explode in six billion years anyway…’ (p.164) the sisters stand in silence, staring at each other through the speckled mirror of a pub bathroom. Nelly thinks:

‘And the Venn diagram of us split apart again… How could I bridge the galaxies? I don’t know but I had to try,’ (p.164).

Like in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), where familial intimacy is peppered with silence, pain, and failed communication, Heartsease dwells in the ache of proximity—that we can be physically close to someone and still unable to reach them.

Hence the ghosts. From the novel’s first line – ‘I saw my mother for a long time after she died,’ (p1) – Kruimink signals the spectral. But Heartsease isn’t a ghost story in the way of misty graveyards or icy hallways. Its hauntings are ambiguous: are they memory, time loops, energy, or muscle memory? The novel shares tonal and structural DNA with Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, in which a character also named Nell is haunted by visions of the ‘bent-neck lady,’ only to discover she is seeing herself from the future. Nina haunts Nelly, and later Nelly haunts Lot through anecdote, through the syntax of remembered conversations, through the rituals of her sister’s grief. In one of the most moving scenes, Nina’s ghost slides beneath Nelly’s electric blanket:

Ellen says, ‘…I never really felt like you liked me.’
Nina replies: ‘What a silly thing to say.’ And later: ‘Your eyes remember me… Your ears remember me. Your heart remembers me.’ (p. 92–93)

In this liminal space—between connection and estrangement—distance is most keenly felt. Connection is possible here, but fragile. And more often than not, it’s what remains unsaid that creates the fracture: Lot not telling Nelly she loves her in the bathroom; Josh never revealing to Nelly that he is asexual; Nina and her mother Anna’s fractured relationship.

A central theme of Heartsease is memory’s unreliability, particularly around childhood. Nelly, for instance, is preoccupied with the time she shot her friend, Lily McGrath, with an arrow. She recalls an image of Lily lying ‘plank-like’ in the backseat of a car. And yet, even as she narrates the scene, doubt creeps in:

‘This can’t be a true memory, of course. Surely they would have called an ambulance.’ (p.113).

This slippage between memory and reality is like Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘screen memories,’ where emotionally charged or traumatic events are overwritten by more banal details, or remembered in displaced, symbolic form. Less threatening childhood memories – like falling leaves in a storm – veil painful ones. Similarly, in Heartsease, Kruimink allows the unreliability of Nelly’s recollection to do more than suggest faulty memory; it becomes a device through which grief, guilt, and trauma persist, unprocessed.

Kruimink also explores memory’s material trace. Nelly is an organ donor; her heart lives on. This literal transference becomes a metaphor for how the world remembers the dead. Later in the novel, Josh reads Lot a sci-fi story he’s created in which the captain of the ship, upon encountering death, sees the hugeness of the light in the spaces between the growing spots of darkness and knows it doesn’t matter at all:

‘The molecules of their bodies will just carry on.’ (p238).

Of course, molecules don’t just carry on, they change. As a reader, you hope the scientific fact offers Lot the same strange comfort it once gave Nelly, widening the small overlap of their Venn diagram. In this way, Heartsease is less concerned with what happened than with how we remember what happened—and how those memories, incomplete and refracted, move us forward.

Heartsease is not so much a novel about death as it is about the enduring complexity of love—between mothers and daughters, between sisters, between the living and the dead. And perhaps more elusively, between reader and character. Like all great novels, Kruimink achieves something wonderful: she keeps her characters—especially Nelly—alive not through molecules, but through voice, memory, and the intimacy of the page.

Citations

1. https://www.theaureview.com/books/author-interview-kate-kruimink-heartsease/
2. Bergson.Creative Evolution(Ch. 1, pgs. 4-6), New York, Camelot. (1911) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26163/26163-h/26163-h.htm
2.https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/henri-bergson-biography/

NINA CULLEY is a Thai-Welsh writer and critic based in Naarm. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Aniko Press, Mascara Review, and more. As a theatre, arts, and literary critic, her work is regularly published in Time Out, Limelight, and ArtsHub. In 2024, she was named one of Mascara’s Emerging Critics, and she is a 2025 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Nina previously worked as Editorial Assistant at Kill Your Darlings.

Guido Melo is an Afro-Brazilian-Latinx Post Graduate Research Candidate at Victoria University in Naarm (Melbourne). He is also the Vice President of the African Studies Group at Melbourne University. He holds positions as a board member of the Incubate Foundation. He is a Multilingual author, and his words can be found in Australia in Meanjin Quarterly, Kill Your Darlings, Peril Magazine, Colournary Magazine, ABC, Mantissa Poetry, Ascension Magazine, SBS Voices, SBS Portuguese, Overland Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review and Voz Limpia Poesia. He writes for Africa is a Country Magazine. In Brazil Guido writers in portuguese for Negrê, Alma Preta Journalism. Guido is a contributor to books such as Growing Up African in Australia (Black Inc., 2019), Racism: Stories on Fear, Hate & Bigotry (Sweatshop, 2021), Resilience: a celebration of poetry, fiction, and essays from Mascara Literary Review (Ultimo Press, 2022), Povo (Sweatshop, The Routledge Handbook of Media Education Futures Post-Pandemic (Routledge, 2022) and The Handbook of Critical Whiteness | Deconstructing Dominant Discourses Across Disciplines (Springer, 2023).

I am keeping the Franco Cozzo

The glimmer of yellow sunlight rushes, across my window, moving towards the west as the sun sluggishly travels away in the direction of another hemisphere. Like a truck without breaks, the evening is fast approaching, running over everything in front of her. I am sitting on a comfortable, feather filled, white couch in the centre of the living room in my new leafy, west-facing Windsor apartment. As I press the play button on my small silver Sony stereo remote control, the crescendo of the ethereal airy melody of the flute gently rises on tones of mi & sol, in this tropical fado titled: Trocando em Miudos (‘Trading in Smallness’). 

The quivering, almost hoarse male vocals are introduced as the song impregnates the room… the solo of the piano then initiates. Then his voice begins to sing. The lyrics of this Brazilian ballad courageously attempt to dissect in small detail how a divorce’s final act occurs. 

The scene, constructed and played in the song, takes place in an imaginary living room where two people (a man and his partner) discuss how they reached this final point in their relationship where, separation is, unfortunately, inevitable. In his broken voice, he narrates this painful-to-listen monologue, in which he sings the entire song, verging on tears. It is hard to know for sure if he was interpreting it or if he was actually feeling pain when he recorded the melody—throughout the track, the gloomy mood swings between triumph, advice, and believable passionate rage. 

The protagonist is sharing the last moments of his relationship, in what seems to be a passive aggressive somewhat heated showdown… where both characters are concluding the closing aspects of their separation. They are both, awkwardly, deciding who will keep what. As the song progresses, they go through item by item until when, eventually, his final physical departure from the dwelling will conclude. The dirty laundry is in public, and we, the listeners, are dragged into this messy, supposedly private, embarrassing situation, leaving even the most assertive and well-resolved of us thinking and wondering, what if it was me? 

As the song title states, “Trading in Smallness” is an accurate picture of many divorces… a timeless depiction of a breakage, a familiar feeling for an ever-increasing number of us. As the song continues, the singer gives advice, suggestions, and apologies for all the misdeeds that led the couple to that dreadful moment. I can feel my pulse increasing as I listen to the music; something is disturbing in the lyrics, for there are no heroes to stand behind. There are no sides to take. 

Throughout the one hundred and fifty-one seconds that the song lasts, you can hear a degree of bitterness that can be tasted, resembling when you drink an old wine that has passed its heydays and metamorphosed into vinegar. 

In another section, he apologises for the broken promises he made and could not keep. I often think that promises are alive creatures born broken. Their fate is to fracture. Doomed to succumb. Nonetheless, we insist on making them. 

Towards the end, in one of its lines, the chanson goes like this: “Devolva o Neruda que voce me tomou… e nunca leu” – which roughly translates to “Give me back my Neruda [book]… because you never read it anyway…” The protagonist moves from almost crying to singing this part with a smile on the corner of his face (you can hear him scoffing). He interprets it with a chauvinistic arrogant air of superiority as if in between the lines, he says, “You didn’t even read the greatest poet of all time…. You did not deserve me anyhow”.

Mum and Dad’s Divorce

Growing up, this Brazilian song, composed and sung by Rio de Janeiro’s music legend Chico Buarque, was on rotation on my father’s 3 in 1 vinyl player. In all fairness, in my opinion, Buarque’s 1978 album is perfect, and I still listen to it to this day. It is full of sambas, batuques, and other ballads, yet, sitting in my new living room under Basquiat’s crown, none of the songs makes more sense today than this one. 

In hindsight, however, I can see how my father was sending subtle (well, not so subtle) hints about what was to come. It should not have been a surprise for me then that he and my mother would, eventually, break the promises they made all those years ago at Salvador da Bahia’s famous Bomfim church. Despite five children and their original commitment to each other, my mum and dad, too, got divorced.

Researchers have shown that children of divorced parents are more likely to have socio-emotional, academic, and mental health concerns. In fact, we are 50% more likely to divorce ourselves than those children from intact families. So, of course, I was impacted, especially as the elder of five siblings. I was forced to step into my parent’s shoes and was, unwillingly, dragged into their separation. Besides all the home cleaning I had to do growing up and the babysitting of my younger siblings, I now had to face my parents in a court of law. They mercilessly placed on me, their eldest child, the cruel incumbrance of being a witness to their divorce.

Divorce Court

From that day in court, I have a faint memory. I have, unsurprisingly, blocked most of it, yet I remember arriving at the law court in Rio de Janeiro, the tropical heat, and the cloudy (or at least all looked stormy in my head), humid grey day. I spent most of the time looking at the dusty wooden floorboards. I recall alternating between looking down to the ground or looking up at the white ceiling full of spiderwebs. Above me, an old silver rusty metal fan squeaked, producing no wind at all, even though, all the while, like Sisyphus, it slowly turned. My still in development brain, was running my neurons on the speed of light, trying to find an answer to this one question: how can I escape this situation? 

Once again, alike to the fictional divorce in Buarque’s song, in this one, there were no heroes to stand behind. There were no sides to take. 

My name got called and I was conducted by a police officer. I was placed on an old wooden chair facing my parents, folk present in there, and the court’s Judge. As I sat on the witness stand, I was instantly told by the grey-haired pale Judge: ‘If you lie, I can place you in prison for perjury”. Looking back, he probably read my fearful eyes. Even for a third-world kid living in a nation like Brazil, where things are rougher, this was not your average sixteen-year-old idea of a day.

I honestly don’t recollect much of what happened after that, but I remember one thing from that day. Once I left that place, I secretly promised myself that if I ever got married, I would never get divorced.

Melbourne

Very much in love, I arrived in Melbourne, Australia, in February 2003, just after Valentine’s Day. Those were the Victoria on the Move days. The place was exciting! The Hong Kong-born Australian businessman John So was the mayor of the City of Melbourne, and the Australian-born of Lebanese heritage, Steve Bracks, was the state’s premier. I remember my first AFL Anzac Day game and being impressed by a small blonde chap playing for Essendon (later, I would know his name was James Hird). I also recall the large number of cranes covering the skies all over the city. 

The Melbourne many know today was being built. Northcote was cheap and unwanted by some, but it was already undergoing significant transformation. Fitzroy was artsy, trendy, and grungy. What is Richmond’s Ikea today was bushland (literally), and where now is the “new” South Yarra full of high-rises was all old warehouses. John Howard was on his third term in government as prime minister, and September 11th had just occurred a little over one year prior. 

In those days, way before Google and smartphones, between trying to familiarise myself with my newfound home, I watched many TV shows trying to understand the ethos of the nation, shows like Neighbours (I could never really connect with Home and Away), The Secret Life of Us and many episodes of A Current Affair. 

One day, however, casually flicking on the television, I saw it for the first time: The Franco Cozzo TV ad. It got imprinted in my mind straight away. I am unsure why I enjoyed it then. But I instantly loved it. Maybe it was because, like me, he had an accent, perhaps it was because the furniture just enamoured me, or maybe it was because he gave me hope that an immigrant could be successful in this land. If a Hong Kong man with Chinese heritage, a Lebanese descendant, and now a Sicilian Italian accented old guy can have a go in this place, why won’t I have a chance too? I thought.

Footscray

Either way, I remember the impulse to cross the town to visit his warehouse in “Foot-a-scray”. I promised I would buy something in there. So, one Saturday arvo, this is what we did. We venture to the west. When I got there, I instantly noticed the smell of naphthalene coming from the cupboards, the jam-packed baroque furniture, and the entourage of families of all ethnicities and walks of life pushing several generations together in one go. This was such a foreign vision to me, yet somehow so very familiar. It was all fascinating to watch. Sometimes in life, you know you are witnessing history happen in front of your eyes, if not collective, at least your own history; this was one of those moments. I wish I could tell you that I loved everything in there, but the truth is that those old European furniture styles did not fit my idea of modern living. My freshly built new pad located in St Kilda needed something cooler. His shop could not keep its TV ads’ promises of fantastic furniture (at least for my taste), so, in the end, after much effort to find something I would want, I left with a beautiful and over-elaborate wooden coat hanger because I did not want to leave empty-handed. It was too early in my new Australian life for me to break promises. I thought.

Over the years, however, the piece grew on me, and for anyone who ever visited my house, I would say, please use the coat hanger. “By the way, that is a Franco Cozzo coat hanger,” I would say with a smirk. As time passed, especially after the place closed down in 2018, fewer and fewer people knew or remembered the Melbourne icon and its significance for an entire generation of Melbournians. 

Life continues, and years have passed. Kids came, houses got bigger, but spaces grew smaller. As the first year after the pandemic’s peak loomed towards its end, I, too, like my father before me, got divorced. 

Promises are born broken.

I never wished for this to ever happen, but there I was. Faced with uncertainty and visiting old fears that are now surfacing as anew. As I left the high-ceiling townhouse that we spent decades paying a mortgage for, moving to a much smaller apartment in the nearby suburb, I (inevitably?) had my ‘Trading in Smallness’ moment. In that living room, almost detached from my body, we were deciding who would take the kids to gymnastics, who would keep the glassware, and the cutlery set , who would take the pillows…. which book would stay or go (all books came with me…. Well… except for Scar tissue by Anthony Kiedis because I never care to read it anyway) 

Amongst this whirlwind that separation can place individuals, one thing was clandestinely on repeat in my mind, and when the time emanated, like a Freudian slip, it came out:

“I am keeping the Franco Cozzo”, I bust out viscerally, leaving no possibility for disagreements. In hindsight, lol…they did not want the old coat hanger anyway.

In cases of breakage like this, I am sure I am not alone; everyone likely has something they want to keep should they ever leave. Leaving can be subjective; it may be a shared house with your mates, a parents’ home or an ex-partnership gone south. Like the Australian frenzy for toilet paper in early 2020, things don’t have to make sense or be rational. 

Sometimes, we just feel, and this is okay. Ultimately, when all is lost, we require some control even when it means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

In all fairness, my divorce was nothing like the song, and I think things were civilised…considering. 

I kept the coat hanger and still show it to every visitor to my residence; in a way, the old piece of furniture reminds me of a Melbourne that is no more. It also reminds me of the possibilities for the future and the promises I still am to make and, inevitably, break. 

The Franco Cozzo and his shop will live forever through his family, but it will also live through me and through everyone who owns a piece of his enchanted wonder place. 

One day, however, when I am no more and the earth reconnects to me, the coat hanger may end up in an op shop somewhere or on a dump unrecognised, unloved, and discarded; until then, I promise: I am keeping the Franco Cozzo!

If there is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears

by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

Gazebo

ISBN: 978-0-6456337-5-7

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR-JOHNSON

In the opening poem of If there is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon writes,

I want to write
structure will work: a sonnet, a sestina,
a couplet—the baby
sh—
its

In these five lines the poet marries both the possibility and actuality of a mother’s daily
routine, more specifically, the creative mother’s daily routine. As the structure of the poem
proves, in mothering, best intentions fall apart. The lines are indicative of what to expect
from the collection in terms of form: sestina and couplets, yes, but also a villanelle, cento,
erasure, ghazal, prose poems, tiny poems, those poems that read as near-lists and those poems
that work with opening-line repetitions. As evidenced in the nine erasure poems that cradle
the nine months of pregnancy, taken from Markoff and Mazel’s What to Expect When You’re
Expecting, Damjanovich-Napoleon stresses playful craft and showcases her originality. The
first month opens with:

Welcome to your pregnancy!

Maybe it’s     tender

But
your

body is                      making to

be

In ‘Maybe it’s tender’ the poet begins with what might be considered a romanticisation of
pregnancy, but then the syntax gets jiggy and excites. Lines two through four don’t work,
then, as a countering device to the warmth of the opening lines, but rather a positive boost.
The following stages of pregnancy continue to be a rather jolly ride, and by the time
we get to the ninth month, the last lines read:

the longest month

the longest

measuring

life on the outside

umbilical

suckle

Here’s exciting news:

Again, in overturning grammar by ending with a colon, the previous lines seem to shine a
little brighter.

In some poetry collections, the inclusion of formed poetry, such as erasures, can feel
workshoppy, but similar to David Stavanger’s Case Notes – a collection of poems on mental
illness and the health systems in place – If there is a Butterfly embraces a plethora of styles as
a way to show the many facets of the core theme, which in this instance is motherhood. The
poet comes off as frisky and fun – even funny – because of her chosen structural diversions,
setting this collection apart from others exploring motherhood by seemingly saying It’s not
rocket science! No, in this collection it is struggle, tenderness, absurdity, disaster and the
overwhelming, all-important love. The messiness of motherhood in Damjanovich-Napoleon’s
hands thrives on and creates energy.

In the same way that the poems’ configurations inform the many layers of mothering
on an emotional level, so too do they apprise Damjanovich-Napoleon’s categorisations of the
mothering concept. Early on in the book is a poem about the morning-after pill, which
implies timing and circumstance are enough for a woman to make a choice, and that the
choice is indeed an important one. Following on that, there are poems about abortion,
miscarriage, phantom pregnancies, infertility and endometriosis, which sit beside those of
incubating, birthing and nurturing. Women who are not mothers know what mothering is
because, first of all, and for the most part, they were mothered, and secondly, and for the
most part, they have a body that is built for birthing and live in a society which expects
birthing, so whether they have children or not, motherhood is highly impressionistic. Aware
that motherhood is also a personal construct, If there is a Butterfly is Damjanovich-
Napoleon’s own.

Having lived in the United States for the decade that delivered the birth of her son and
encapsulated the early years of his life, American politics beyond motherhood comes into
play. There is mention of Obama, school shootings and Trump’s wall, and though the latter is
largely amusing – and scary – the former two stick to the brief, in which the subject is held by
instances of mothering. The following is from ‘We Will Not Speak His Name’:

[…]You wake up, but before you do, he tries to make butterfly kisses, pressing his
face and eye into your cheek. These are not butterfly kisses, but you don’t care. ‘More
more,’ he says. You wake up, but before you do it’s the questions, ‘Fire in sky?’ ‘Yes,
that’s the sun.’ ‘Burns?’ ‘Only if you get too close.’ You wake up, turn on the TV, 20
children and 6 adults have been killed in a mass shooting at a grade school in
Newtown, Connecticut… . You wake up. Toast burnt, scrape, Jam, peanut butter.
‘Triangles please, mama.’ You stare out the kitchen window at the rising sun – today
it is fogged over, distant, struggling to climb.

The world does not stop for tragedy, nor does mothering, which is a world unto itself, so
though this poem is about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, Damjanovich-
Napoleon does not waiver from the book’s premise, and the collection is stronger for it. In
fact the majority of the poems adhere so fully to the motherhood motif that when one does
not, it feels out place, a questionable anomaly.

Just as Damjanovich-Napoleon adopts forms that adhere to rules, she also works with
original, fresh and satisfyingly surprising structure, placing the poet in the realm of creator,
where mothers also exist, and this duality of creatorship feels entirely intentional. In the poem
‘The Punctuation Of Infertility’ (recalling that Damjanovich-Napoleon’s concept of
motherhood would and must include those who cannot bear children but long to), she enlists
a punctuation then gives it a title:

!          [the first year]
!?          [the second]

and so forth until we reach

/ /          [how I learned to live with it]

The poem’s singular structure is what makes it so personal, even beyond the line that reads

X           [one year after my father died]

It’s a pity that this type of innovation covering an entire poem doesn’t always transfer to
single words, though, as in the opening line of ‘Papercuts’:

Papercut on my tongue, the metallic taste of bro-

ken
words

In this case the shape of the word ‘broken’ predictably follows its meaning, and the pathos is
overstated. This is very different from the opening poem I cited above, when the baby
characteristically

sh—
its

In that instance, the reader is suitably asked to make meaning rather than have the meaning
handed to them.

Poets who write about their own children might find it difficult to balance the
gruelling tussle with the heartfelt delight and might lean toward either frantic frustration or an
over-ripeness of an unconditional love. In these cases the best we can hope for is lack of
cruelty and a minimalised sentimentality, respectively. If Damjanovich-Napoleon wobbles,
it’s toward that over-ripeness of an unconditional love, as in ‘On Dropping My Favourite Tea
Cup After Five Hours Broken Sleep’. The prose poem begins with ‘I feel as vulnerable as a
tea cup with a broken handle; as fresh milk left on the countertop in 40-degree heat;’ and
continues with a list of susceptible items or animals, then ends with ‘as a mother holding her
newborn for the first time.’ Most every collection has a few ‘filler poems’ – poems that are
nice, that are good, but aren’t challenging or exceptional – and maybe that’s where her more
maudlin ones lie. As a whole, though, as a body of work, If there is a Butterfly that Drinks
Tears accomplishes the desired balance so well that it deserves respect, and beyond that, it’s
a truly entertaining book.

HEATHER TAYLOR-JOHNSON is a recent South Australian Arts Fellow. She writes novels, autofiction, poetry and essays recognised in prizes such as the Readings Prize for New Fiction, ABR’s Calibre Prize and Island’s Nonfiction Prize. She lives and writes on Kaurna land.

The Pulling

by Adele Dumont

Scribe

ISBN 9781922585912

Reviewed by AZ COSGROVE

Ostensibly, Adele Dumont’s collection The Pulling (2024) is about the author’s experience of
trichotillomania, or compulsive hair pulling. Importantly, I myself have never experienced
trichotillomania, and I refuse to participate in the historical silencing that has too often been
directed towards those of diverse and marginalised embodiment—I know that chloroform ache
all too well. Instead, as Joan Didion writes in ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, I will write ‘How it
felt to me,’ (1) — I keep this sentence in a folder on my computer called ‘Good Words’, and I
open it when I need to remember that, like Dumont, I love words. With words, we can perform
magic. It allows us to articulate the inarticulable, to crack open the world. With words, we can
transform that serrated knife-flash that some of us see glinting in the eyes of our reflections into
something beautiful, iridescent. It’s miraculous, like water into wine. (Or, like the class at
Hogwarts I dreamt about as a kid before I grew up and JK became a massive TERF.) This
magic is what Dumont achieves in The Pulling, and it is the core function of Own Voices
literature, the category to which this collection emphatically belongs.

In parallel to her writing career, Dumont also works as an English teacher, and each
word of these essays feels deliberately chosen, the sentences like carefully placed
brushstrokes. In ‘Psychologists’ she writes how her father observes that she’s ‘always arranging
things into patterns’ (135). she describes how she carefully eats mandarins, ‘holding each
individual segment up to the light, like a jewel’ (136), dissecting the seeds with her teeth to
reveal their insides, ‘waxy smooth and immaculate’ (136).

In these essays, the patterns are made of words. They are arranged in golden spirals
that open up again and again. In the essay ‘Anatomy of Pulling’, for example, Dumont provides
scrupulous, almost encyclopedic, descriptions of individual hairs—‘some kinked like old wire;
some whisker-thin’ (38), their roots ‘pearl white and translucent, cleave[d] to the hair like muscle
to a bone, and the very tips as black as can be’ (42)—and the granularity of detail transports us
into a new world: one viewed through a magnifying glass, where hairs are as big as trees, and
the scalp is a vast ‘swathe of land’. In this world, even time is distorted, it’s usual linearity
replaced with an ‘eternal present’, as if told by a clock dripping from the wall. This is Dumont’s
own version of Wonderland. Worlds like this are created by damn good storytelling. Suzanne
Keen calls this “narrative empathy” (‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy’, 2006), and it is one of the
most sociologically potent functions of literature.

Occasionally, in just one or two graceful, tilt-shift sentences, Dumont renders vast shifts
in scale that hurtle us from a minute, Lilliputian world to one that is vast, geological:

‘If individual hairs are sufficiently resisted and survive this precarious phase,
and achieve some extra millimeters of length, then they become the most endangered-feeling of all,
like they’ve somehow outlived their prognosis, like storm clouds heavy with rain, like the
temptation of overripe berries to birds.’ (39)

This cinematic style reminds me of writing by Virginia Woolf—aeroplanes and snail shells, words
stretched, made thin, like streaks of cloud.

However, as a reader, I found myself unable to become fully immersed in this collection.
While the decadent style of writing was initially very effective in evoking the firsthand experience
of Dumont, I found that, after a while, it became a bit overwhelming, and I felt there was an
imbalance between the attention given to the microscopic and macroscopic. While we are
permitted brief glances of the world she inhabits—the vineyards where she spent much of her
childhood, the ‘slick’ (103) rooms of the hair clinic that she began visiting as an adult, where the
division between real and illusory is barely intact.

But for the most part, the story-worlds in these essays are largely bounded within Dumont’s fingertips,
or just beyond, in her brain. I was left wanting more: I wanted to know the heat of the sun, the smell
of ripe oranges. While Dumont gives us a thorough psychological description of her partner (mysteriously
referred to as ‘M’), we aren’t given any details about what he looks like. Likewise, we don’t get much
of a picture of the house they share. Is it brick or weatherboard? What is the colour of the carpet in
the living room,or are the kitchen bench tops? It would be harsh to call this writing ‘lacklustre’,
but it did lack a kind of three-dimensionality. It created a world without gravity—where a person can
begin to forget the weight of their body, their flesh—an ironic impression for a collection, in the
first place, about a bodily phenomenon.

The use of second person narration in these essays is notable. This style creates a
dynamic between the reader and narrator that is quite distinct from typical narrative structure,
and which must be carefully navigated, particularly in memoir. While I can appreciate how this
mode of narration can create a powerful sense of intimacy—take, for instance, Ursula K
Le Guin’s short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), the beautiful novella
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (1998), and contemporary works of memoir like Katia Ariel’s
The Swift Dark Tide (2023) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran (2021) — I found that here it
often gave the essays an uncomfortably confessional tone, like the experiences of Dumont’s
‘second, secret life’ were sins whispered between the cubicles of a church confessional: ‘How
your face will pucker, your eyes narrow, like you’ve bitten into something unripe’ (37). However,
as someone who themselves has a body and experience that is unarguably other, I can
appreciate that this is an expression of the internalised shame (appropriately, a title of one of the
essays in this collection) that our rigidly normative society and culture inflicts on us.

After my brain injury, I remember swimming back towards consciousness and looking at
the pale, arachnoid thing that was my hand on the hospital bed beside me, thinking: how can
that possibly be my hand? I have learnt that this thing—that I know now to call “Otherness”—is
not singular, static: it’s highly individual, a thing curled differently in every life, like the coils of
acid inside each of our cells, in each strand of hair. These essays are stories of Otherness—and
these stories help us to better map the world, our culture, our minds.

‘I feel, I feel, I feel,’ (13, 51, 56, 167) writes Dumont, again and again, and the words
echo: ‘I am, I am, I am.’ (2)

Citations

1. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967: 134)
2. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, (1999:189)

AZ COSGROVE is a 27 year old trans wheelchair user and an emerging writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His work has appeared in such publications as Voiceworks, Archer, Overland. He is currently completing a Masters of Literature and also holds a Bachelor of Biomedical Science. In 2023, he was one of the ABC Regional Storyteller Scholars.

Vessel

by Dani Netherclift

Upswell Publishing

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT

On its opening page, with very little in the way of preamble, Vessel establishes its central
incident:

1993. A Saturday. Thirty-eight degrees Celsius. I don’t know what time it is when I witness
my father and brother drown, minutes – perhaps only seconds – apart (11).

Vessel’s narrator writes that in these moments, time seems to have ‘turned outside itself’ (11).
The gushing water of the irrigation channel, which stems from Victoria’s Waranga Basin, is
‘turning in on itself’ (13). Structurally, Vessel likewise resists a linear, straightforward
progression. Described by author Dani Netherclift as an ‘elegiac lyric essay’, it moves in
spirals and loops, returning, always, to that key moment of witnessing.

Early on, Netherclift makes reference to various documents: coroners’ reports, police witness
statements, newspaper articles, and obituary columns. Vessel might be seen as an attempt to
write beyond the limits of this official record. This is more than a filling in of detail, or an
injection of feeling. Rather, the book’s lyric essay form is one that welcomes ambiguity and
fragmentation. It’s one with ample room for silences and white spaces, and therefore an
apposite form for writing about something as amorphous as grief.

Repeatedly, Vessel’s narrator revisits what she has already established. She questions, for
instance, how much she really ‘witnessed’ (23), given the impossibility of actually seeing her
father’s or brother’s underwater struggle. She also clarifies that at the time, she didn’t realise
what she was witnessing was a drowning per se: ‘It took a long time for that knowledge to
settle’ (20). The coroner’s report, she informs us, described her brother’s body as ‘wedged’
(21) against a pylon, but later on, she wonders whether actually the word used was ‘nestled’
(38). On page 83, she tells us that a Mickey Mouse doll was placed in her brother’s coffin,
but on page 158 reveals that she actually later found this same doll in among a bag of her
brother’s belongings. That Netherclift does not attempt to iron out these inconsistencies and
slippages is one of the book’s strengths. Vessel is not a constructed representation of
an event
already wrestled with: it charts the narrator’s ongoing wrestling, and is all the more alive for
it.

Vessel accretes by fragments, gathering meaning through associative logic. A reference to
research on the foetal cells of babies remaining in the mother’s body for decades transitions,
for example, into Netherclift wondering whether her brother’s cellular traces might also
remain in the body of water where he drowned. A vignette of the author’s mother kissing her
great grandmother’s lips a final goodbye is juxtaposed with imagery of roadkill, and of
drowned refugee bodies, in turn shifting to list the various offerings placed in her brother’s
and father’s caskets. In this way, Vessel moves beyond the level of personal bereavement,
and into a richer meditation on loss.

One of Netherclift’s preoccupations is time, its strange elasticity and malleability. The three
days it takes for her brother’s body to be recovered is an ‘in-between place’ (19); the six days
between the accident and funeral ‘suspended time’ (64). The accident has cleaved time in
two: the before, and the after. From one paragraph to the next, Netherclift skips deftly
through decades past, the accident casting various memories in a new light, and lending them
new significance. Netherclift’s personal experience of grief is given especial resonance by
being tied to wider phenomena. She writes, for example, of bodies which are never
recovered, and of the living who as a result are stranded in limbo-time. In that strange,
interim time when some of her family members are yet to learn of the drownings, she
recognises what Anne Carson calls the ‘impending approach of unknown absence’ (67).
Their lives are still ‘intact’ and ‘uninterrupted’ (66).

Netherclift honours the blank spaces in her story. There are, foremost, the stark spaces left
behind by her father and brother. But there’s also the incompleteness, and shakiness of her
memories of each: at times she hardly recognises others’ versions of them. Occasionally, she
leaves several centimetres of blank space on the page, for instance when turning to her loved
ones’ last, ‘unfathomable’ (16) moments. Netherclift never actually sees her father’s or
brother’s body (the funeral director refuses her) and, in accordance with the findings of the
studies she cites, she instead conjures ‘horrible outlines of an unknown shape’ (78).
Netherclift’s own unresolved loss is tied to a more overarching, societal discomfort (in
Western cultures) around dead bodies, and damaged ones especially. Vessel writes its way
into this uncomfortable space.

As well as the two drownings, Netherclift describes various deaths among her extended
family and her ancestors. She weaves in portraits of a US couple who devote their retirement
to searching for long-lost bodies; of free diver Natalia Molchanova, whose body was never
found; of Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself. There is also reference to morgues; to
memento mori; to bodies hit by trains; to Norse bog bodies; to lynchings; and to the
Holocaust. This is undeniably heavy material, and mostly this is leavened by the delicacy of
Netherclift’s language, and the fact she handles her research with a lightness of touch.

Nevertheless, some readers may wish for more moments of reprieve. There are scanned
colour images throughout Vessel (mostly envelopes from letters written by the author’s great-
grandfather to her great-grandmother, from the trenches of WWI) and these do provide small
pockets of readerly pause. But tonally, the prose is earnest and sober, and unrelentingly so.
It’s a tricky thing, when writing about something as unremitting as grief, to know just how
much the reader can sit with. Some may find the experience of reading Vessel occasionally
wearying, while others may find it a source of great solace.

In recent times, psychologists have recognised the therapeutic value of writing in helping
individuals process grief and trauma. Netherclift states that, through the writing of Vessel, she
was able to ‘transform the bodies of [her] father and brother into bodies of text and enact a
sense of closure’ (1 ). In interleaving her own family’s narrative with the writing of others, Vessel
transcends personal elegy, and becomes something more ambitious: writing as testament; as
reclamation; as communion.

Notes

1 Interview in Brightside Story Studio: Dani Netherclift on Writing to resolve grief.
https://brightsidestorystudio.com/2024/10/28/dani-netherclift-on-writing-to-resolve-grief/

ADELE DUMONT is a writer and critic. Her latest book is The Pulling (Scribe Australia & UK).

Empathy

By Hoa Pham

MIT Press

ISBN 9781913380618

Reviewed by JUDITHH HUANG

In Empathy, a speculative fiction novel that blends some of the most potent concerns in our post-pandemic world, Hoa Pham has created a dystopia in which unethical medical experiments involving human cloning and mass pharmaceutical control are not just practiced but accepted as a given. In this paranoia-soaked novel, we follow two young women, Vuong in Vietnam and My in Germany, in interlacing narratives centred around their experience of Empathy, the latest psychotropic drug permeating the party scene in the nightclubs of Berlin.

Vuong is one of five clones (termed “multiples” in the novel’s parlance) brought up by the shadowy Department in Vietnam. One of two multiples living in Vietnam, she is also employed by the Department as a psychology researcher. When we first meet her, she is meeting the other Vietnam-based multiple, Lien, who has been kept in far more deprived circumstances and who has just murdered her foster father for killing and eating pigs. With this bang of an opening we are plunged into a world of clandestine government operatives, Hui circles that may have ties to Cold War spy agencies, and international conspiracies involving mood-altering drugs.

Meanwhile, My meets Truong in Berlin, a bad boy complete with ponytail and dragon tattoo, and predictably falls for him when he gives her Empathy at a nightclub. These two narratives are intriguing enough to propel the reader through the book to uncover the conspiracy behind Empathy, the secret of its origins and the purpose for its distribution. To this reader, one of the most compelling themes of the book was the authenticity of emotion. Hoa Pham depicts the delicate line between real and synthetic emotion in her characters’ minds with a deft hand. This is especially resonant to me, as my experience with taking psychiatric drugs has meant a constant questioning of the authenticity of my emotions. In the book, emotional responses are affected by Empathy the drug as well as the “organic” Empathy that courses through the veins of the five multiples, leading to an ecstatic sense of connection as well as discomfort at the blurred lines of consent. The line between mental health and illness under the influence of Empathy, and the question of whether My’s paranoia is justified, is also a thread that runs through the book.

Closely related to this is the push and pull between individualism and group identity, perhaps best understood in the multiples. Separated at age five, Vuong and Lien in Vietnam, Geraldine in Australia and Khanh and Giang in Aotearoa/New Zealand have an insatiable longing for each other, a longing which eclipses their various romantic partnerships. Khanh and Giang were raised as a pair, and share an extraordinary bond. When the question becomes whether the distilled essence of this bond, the drug Empathy, can lead to world peace through the sublimation of individual identity, even the multiples, who have been raised their whole lives as laboratory experiment subjects, seem to favour the use of Empathy to control the population.

The multiples themselves present an interesting “quintuplet study” of what happens when identical clones are raised in laboratory conditions in Asia versus the West, with two of them brought up in Asia while the other three were brought up in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Geraldine, the Australian multiple, and Khanh and Giang, the “twins” brought up in Aotearoa, move with greater privilege and self-assurance than the Vietnamese multiples, being assured of the rights of their citizenships even though they are still clearly highly manipulated test subjects. The implications that unethical experiments are “outsourced” to poorer countries with fewer legal safeguards, and that democracies enshrine certain individual rights better, are clear.

But even Vuong notes that, when all five are linked through their natural Empathy, “the majority would get their way” (p 163) because of how overwhelming their influence is with the heightened connection – perhaps in itself a critique of majority rule in a democracy.

Where the novel succeeds most is in conveying the paranoia, control and surveillance that test subjects in a government program live under. Human clones raised as lab rats for life in a developing country where not too much scrutiny is paid seems eerily plausible in our world. Hoa Pham creates an atmosphere of oppressive control in details like Vuong being shocked at Lien’s statement, “We don’t talk about the past here. We talk about the future, what we’re going to become.” The Department mantra coming from Lien’s mouth without a hint of irony frightened me.

(p8)

This atmosphere is again present in the jokes that are more than jokes, which reveal anxieties about rumoured horrors: the “running joke that they did interrogations on the higher levels. At least, we thought it was a joke.” (p32) These small details of hearing government slogans parroted back even by the Department’s victims, and the gallows-humour jokes that are a coping mechanism in the face of unscrupulous authorities, are familiar to me as someone who grew up in another tightly-controlled Southeast Asian country, Singapore, and deeply relatable.

The double-edged sword of Empathy in the novel (and empathy in our world) is revealed in the fact that too much empathy leads to the murder of the foster father in the first chapter, as Lien thinks of the pigs raised in that household as “we” as well – i.e. she identifies with them as much as with her fellow multiples. “You can’t show the same empathy to animals as humans and survive. Not in Viet Nam, anyway.” (p11) Can too much empathy become a problem? Does it lead to weakness, or even violence? And if it can lead to world peace, is that at too great a cost to individual liberty and autonomy? These are the questions that Hoa Pham presents us with. But does she succeed in exploring them?

Empathy has a page-turning quality, but perhaps suffers from its fast pacing. Certain revelations can feel rushed, without enough development to make them feel real. In particular, My’s motivation is a little lacking and her decision to undertake certain drastic actions in aid of Truong’s drug ring was not believable, given that she is not pressed for money and doesn’t trust Truong.

A later plot twist that relies on My being an unreliable narrator is also both too telegraphed and unconvincing, and the final chapter, which brings Vuong’s entire narrative and the reality of more than half the cast into question, is also disappointing in relying on the trope of mental illness leading to delusions, and undermines the compelling themes that Hoa Pham built in the world of the book.

The Department, the main antagonist of the book, also seems ubiquitous without ever feeling like a real threat, as the main characters manage to undertake many actions without significant barriers. The Department’s omniscient and omnipresent nature is certainly unsettling, and feeds into the paranoid atmosphere, but it never actually rises to the level of an existential threat.

Hoa Pham’s prose is workmanlike, functioning like Orwell’s window-pane, but occasionally veers into the lyrical, especially when describing the experience of being inside a multiple’s head and thinking as “we”. However, sometimes when plot developments are introduced in the default matter-of-fact voice, the tone and abruptness blunts their impact. As a result, this is an action-packed novel, very rapidly paced and lacking in description or space to digest the implications of certain plot points.

The book also touches on the proliferation of conspiracy theories and vaccine paranoia in the wake of the pandemic, particularly when the multiples seek to go public with their existence only to have the only channels open to their story be conspiracy sites. However, while this is touched on, not much is made of the point. Thus Empathy is a post-pandemic novel that acknowledges the rifts in culture since the culture wars over conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, and fake news without really endorsing any side.

Hoa Pham also centres the Vietnamese diaspora experience in the book, with parents’ Hui circles as networks, My dating a fellow Vietnamese-German Truong but being questioned by her mother if his family was from the North or the South, and a particularly poignant mother-daughter relationship where My wishes for Empathy-like closeness with a mother who barely communicates about her life and is hardly seen between her shifts at work. My’s bisexuality is also introduced in a matter-of-fact way, although her romances are, again, a bit rushed. This queer representation without any angst or fanfare is much appreciated.

Upon closing the book, this reader is left with a deep sense of unease. A lot of emotions are attributed to Empathy, whether in the veins of the multiples or induced through the heart-shaped drugs. But in empathizing with these characters, some of whom may or may not be entirely imaginary, what settles in is a sense of helplessness in the face of the shadowy powers that be. Perhaps that is the prevailing sentiment in the world after the ravages of the pandemic, with its lockdowns, near-mandatory vaccines and dystopian slogans. If so, then Empathy has distilled that sense of helplessness into a pill. Would you take it?

JUDITH HUANG is an Australian-based Singaporean author, poet, literary and science fiction translator, composer, musician, serial-arts-collective-founder, Web 1.0 entrepreneur and VR creator @ www.judithhuang.com. Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, was shortlisted for the EBFP 2017 and Singapore Book Awards 2019. A three-time winner of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award, Judith graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in English and American Literature and Language and taught creative and academic writing at the Harvard Writing Center and Yale-NUS College. She has published original work in Prairie Schooner, Asia Literary Review, Portside Review, Creatrix, The South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, QLRS and Cha as well as being a founding member of the Spittoon Collective and magazine in China, which currently has branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an, Dali, Tucson (AZ, USA) and Gothenburg (Sweden).