Author: mascara

Past & Parallel Lives

Kaya Ortiz,

UWAP

ISBN: 978-1-76080-298-1

Love Like This Isn’t Harmless

Bron Bateman,

 Fremantle Press

ISBN: 9781760995355

Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON

Time travelling: Creating Triumph from Love’s Harm and Fractured Selves

In their debut poetry collection, Past & Parallel Lives Kaya Ortiz weaves the recurrent themes of time travel, and the lives we could have lived or may live, against the backdrop of their queer and Filipino identity. Examining the multiple renderings of identity and place through list poems and free verse poetic forms, they show us how coming out does not happen only once, but rather as a series of repeated revelations to live openly, “my body un / becoming // …over and over again”. Ortiz explores the early blooming of lust, love, and Trek-inspired alien and queer desire in this release. Bron Bateman’s fourth poetry collection, Love Like This Isn’t Harmless, examines a mature queer poet’s heartbreak. In this collection Bateman takes stock, looking back on her life, the cost of love and how to live authentically as a crip, gay woman. Both Ortiz’s and Bateman’s re-makings and revelations are hard fought and won, revealing to the reader the unique struggles of living as one’s true self in a world that seeks conformity.

Migration, discovering oneself and coming out are recurrent themes in Ortiz’s collection, but one of the most compelling through lines is the poet’s exploration of alien characters in Star Trek as a metaphor for queerness and migrant otherness. In “First Contact” the poet reminds us, from an outsider’s perspective, “to remember the self is / secondary to language.” They know the dangers that come with being labelled by others and conversely, how we can define ourselves with language. “Distant Origin” explores the parallels between Ortiz’s life and Star Trek’s B’Elanna Torres, who is half-human and half-Klingon, as “I, too, am split- / between // a star in every quadrant / and home / too many lightyears / away.” Examining this parallel later in “Self-insert Trek: Flashback”, B’Elanna Torres “cleaves and falls into herself, a shattered identity” and through this mirroring process the poet’s “ruptured” self is “reborn.       Rebuilding”. Other poems take deep dives into Trek characters like Seven of Nine, Michael Burnham and Jadzia Dax. Each of these characters struggles with their hybrid identity and outsider status, shows us that “the closet is a matter of time and space”, and contends with epic battles of the self to eventually triumph or be reborn – literally in Jadzia Dax’s case, who is a Trill that has lived seven lives. The Star Trek characters and the additional metaphors of time and space employed by Ortiz bring the reader along with them on a journey that playfully examines what it is to be queer, alien and other while also showing us the possibilities time and space allow us to re-write our past and future selves.

In Bateman’s collection life is complicated and fraught with the trappings of what we lose of ourselves to love another. The twelve poems in the second section “love that crouches, raging” each contain the word “love” with the lengthy titles reading like whimsical poems themselves, such as “To love is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly”. From the ache of infant loss to the vagaries of straight and queer love, Bateman sees love in the aforementioned poem as:

A kiss, a sucker punch, a glance,
all delivered forms of intimacy,
                                        ascending through the bruise-
blue darkness as an idea born
of repetition

The collection’s theme of love’s harm is delivered in the implied violence in the “sucker punch” and “bruise-blue darkness” of the latter lines. As the adage tells us, love is a verb, and in this collection love is measured by these repeated actions, it is not a static state of safety. The loss of a child at three months of age results in grief’s “raging,” and a “Love with nowhere left to hide.” Here grief and love are tethered together, yet love, as always, contains hope. This hope arises in the baby the poet and her partner are expecting, “her parts knitting together / like spring, / like a longing for plum blossoms.” Bateman’s collection examines love through the lens of a mature woman who in “Weightless” she explains, has “come this far, survived this much”. She knows who she is and she knows her wounds, yet this doesn’t stop her moving forward past loss.

Both poets explore the impact of religion and God in their reckoning with love and their queer identity. In two list poems Ortiz speaks to the Catholic doctrine that does not accept queer people. “Hell” is structured around the “Hail Mary” prayer, with the fourth item on their list suggesting other, radical ways of seeing, hinting at a female god, “4. Learn love the way you learn god – unable to look her in the eye”. “The Etymology of Palaam” (goodbye) recounts the tension between religion and being queer where Ortiz creates a mash up of the Filipino language, “Our Father” and the poet’s own prayers, including the exquisite line —their body a metaphor for inedible communion bread — “3. for all that is holy.  my body is / 4. a loaf made of stone”. For the strengths of Ortiz’s utilisation of list poems in this collection, at times the form appears forced, just as form can inspire a poet it can also stifle their expression. Some poems may have benefitted from being written in pure free verse, enabling the poet to stretch their wings when required. In “There was love, like a great, glass eye” Bateman reviews her childhood beliefs in an omnipotent God and her mis-spent faith, “But where was God? She prayed and prayed…// But he closed his eyes to her suffering, // splashing abundance where it didn’t matter / onto endless golden paddocks with myriad insects”. It is an indictment of modern Christianity that neither poet found space for themselves or their sexuality in the church. Yet, as poets, they continue to see awe and beauty in the world without the restrictions of organised religion.

In the opening poem of Bateman’s collection, “Betrayal”, co-written by Andy Jackson, they explore crip-embodiment and how disabled people are viewed as “invisible [by]…infirmity” writing “I extend my cane towards the ground / like a diviner – this path, / this body, not the only crooked things.” It is a compelling metaphor for a collection that stretches the reader out past the crooked path that most lives take to “crip promise,” embracing pain, along with the welcome and unwelcome gifts that it offers. Bateman’s skill as a poet lies in her ability to translate pain in its terror and beauty to the transformation of the self. Whereas, like a magician, Ortiz transmutes their growing pains as an immigrant and coming out as queer into poems that defy time and space. The precision of their words, their blending of Filipino and English, and the architecture of their list poems reveal a poet who has arrived to us with a vision that appears almost fully-formed, for this reason it is no wonder this collection won the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award. Both poets show us that even through fracture, pain and a world that seeks to erase queer, crip and migrant identity they can emerge triumphant, if not unharmed.

This Mournable Body

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Faber and Faber

ISBN 9780571355525

Reviewed by BRIAN OBIRI-ASARE

Right from the get-go, in the third instalment of her Tambudzai series, Tsitsi Dangarembga pinpoints the terrain upon which This Mournable Body will unfold. The novel opens with Tambudzai, now middle-aged, recently unemployed, and mighty hungry for status, checking herself out in the mirror. A hideous image, a fish, with ‘purplish eye sockets, it’s mouth gaping, cheeks drooping,’ (p3) stares back. Caught in an irrepressible surge of dysmorphia, Tambudzai sees a creature she wants nothing to do with. A black woman, barely navigating the thrum of 1990’s Harare, she’s all at sea. The result is tragic. Her perception of herself and her actual self are discordant. Yet, somehow, this tragedy is generative. It allows a propulsive question – how will this divided self heal? – to sit behind one’s eyes throughout the misadventures that follow. 

By cultivating this space, by allowing this question the room to unfurl, Dangarembga takes a risk. Unlike the teenager languishing in a convent boarding school in The Book of Not (where ‘closeness to white people… ruined [her] heart’), the adult Tambudzai is far more intriguingly complex. The source of her malaise isn’t as clear cut. Is it mental illness? Internalised racism? At times she’s perverse, at times she’s pitiable. What’s apparent is that she’s on a journey, leaning towards and then leaning away from the vexed allures of assimilation. In a memorable early scene, a woman in ‘sky-high heels’ (p20) falls while trying to climb into a crowded minibus. Nobody offers a helping hand. Instead, the woman is jeered at. Objects are hurled her way, insults too. She’s stripped of a revealing dress. And in the middle of this attack, the woman spots Tambudzai. There’s a flicker of recognition as they both reside at the same hostel. The woman wordlessly pleads for help. Unable to meet and hold her gaze, Tambudzai looks away and drops the stone she was about to throw. Times have changed. Tambudzai’s now a woman who’s free and separate and enmeshed in a rich and complicated social tapestry from which she has much to learn. 

To be fair, Dangarembga’s risk-taking is familiar. Ever since her esteemed debut, Nervous Conditions, she’s sought to push the African novel into stimulating feminist directions. Way before Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shed light on the lives and concerns of middle class African women, Dangarembga was already on the scene. Her female characters, however, in their unique way, have always seethed, raging against expectations, family, work, school, men, other women, always incandescent, always bristling with life. In this sense, with her focus on what bubbles beneath the surface in polite society, she follows in the pioneering footsteps of her compatriot Dambudzo Marechera. 

This comparison with Marechera is apt given This Mournable Body’s dizzying storytelling form. Second-person narration dominates throughout and the ‘you’ pronoun floods the reader, pressing them into the unasked-for-role as Tambuzai’s double: ‘You drop your gaze,’ (p.24) starts a passage shortly after the minibus episode, ‘but do not walk off because on the one hand you are hemmed in by the crowd. On the other, if you return to solitude, you will fall back inside yourself where there is no place to hide.’ Paired with the simple present tense, the effect of this perspectival mélange is both uncanny and compelling. As a reader ‘you’ are implicated in Tambudzai’s alienation and by virtue of reading her unfolding story ‘you’ participate in that alienation. 

You’re stuck with her. Through three sections, “Ebbing”, “Suspended”, and “Arriving”, you follow Tambudzai through a series of misadventures. You follow her as she leaves her hostel accommodation in shame, finding a room in the house of Mai Mayanga, a devoutly religious widow whose husband was a successful businessman. You follow her as she attempts to build herself back up, putting her education to use by securing work as a teacher. You’re there when she assaults a student, granted a front row seat to an explosion of repressed anguish, rage and frustration. You witness her mental breakdown, her brush with madness, and her sedated stay inside a mental hospital, where her fears appear to her as a hyena, laughing at her:

‘You are an ill-made person. You are being unmade. The hyena laugh-howls at your destruction. It screams like a demented spirit and the floor dissolves beneath you.’
(p.127)

There’s no escape. Dangarembga forces the reader inside Tambudzai’s divided mind and to experience the chaos of her racing thoughts and self-preserving actions. Now, one’s tolerance for such intimacy may understandably vary. After all, a novel stands or falls on its capacity to tell a good story, and to create and reveal elements that make such a story resonant, not on authorial experimentation alone. And on this note, This Mournable Body, at times comes up short. There’s minimal narrative tension. And although Tambudzai is refreshingly true to life, her tragic, at times comedic, inability to shake off her funk becomes a drag. For example, after her release from the mental hospital promises a new beginning, one where she moves in with her cousin Nyasha, her husband Leon, and their two kids, who have all returned to Zimbabwe from a life in Germany, this promise soon withers. Old habits do indeed die young and Tambudzai is no exception. After her breakdown she’s still the same cloyingly self-obsessed, vain, and deluded woman. But this stasis may indeed serve a higher purpose. For Dangarembga is not out to craft the perfect technical novel – she’s out to exaggerate, amplify, and repeat herself so as to breathe life into Tambudzai’s floundering between the twin poles of possible redemption and wilful self-destruction.

The insertion of good dollop of dramatic irony in the final section, “Arriving”, adds a welcome touch to the see-sawing rhythm of Tambudzai’s personal narrative. A chance encounter with Tracey, an old school friend and colleague who ‘couldn’t reconcile what [she] was doing with what [she] believed in,’ (p.236) leads to a cushy job at Tracey’s environmentally friendly tour company. Initially, it’s all sweet: 

‘as tour supervisor of Green Jacaranda, you are still Zimbabwean enough, which is to say African enough, to be interesting to tourists, but not so strange as to be threatening.’ (p.279)

But like clockwork, this newfound normalcy soon starts to unravel. When her colleague Pedzi dreams up “Ghetto Getaway”, a chance for Western tourists to sample authentic urban African living, Tambudzai, ever competitive, dreams up “Village Eco Transit”, a cooked scheme that takes her back to her homestead, which undergoes a makeover so that Western tourists can enjoy an equally authentic experience of rural Africa. 

It’s here, finally, and perhaps too late, that narrative suspense ratchets up. Tambudzai’s journey homes forces her to confront herself. The question sitting behind the readers eyes throughout – how will this divided self heal? – comes into sharper focus. And the result, without spoiling too much, is an insight into the destructive impact of trying and failing and trying to get ahead in life. Conceptually coherent and emotionally rewarding, Dangarembga, through her protagonist Tambudzai, offers a mirror through which the stubborn messiness of post-colonial Zimbabwe finds a telling shape. It’s the 1990’s and it’s no longer Rhodesia, yet ordinary citizens are still encumbered by embedded racist oppressions, chafing under ZANU-PF rule. Distrust simmers and the wounds from a fiercely fought guerilla war still linger. This is the context that shapes Tambudzai both emotionally and spiritually. And it’s something to reflect on and savour.

Cited.

BRIAN OBIRI-ASARE is a Ghanaian-Australian writer working across poetry, prose, and drama. His recent work has appeared in Westerly, Esse Magazine, Southword, The Subuurban Review and other spaces.

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate

by Micaela Sahhar

NewSouth

ISBN 9781761170287

Reviewed by FINLEY JAPP

A photograph, Palestine, c.1920s: a young man has stopped on the side of a country road. He poses with flair beside his car, seeming to drink straight from an ibrik (pitcher). The man exudes confidence and joie de vivre. He appears as a proud Palestinian and a natural tour guide. There is of course no indication, in the image, that he and his family will, decades later, end up in Melbourne, driven out of their community and homeland in the Nakba.

That young man is Micaela Sahhar’s paternal grandfather, Abdullah, and it is with this ebullient photograph that she begins her intimate family history Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An encyclopedia of a Palestinian family (2025). It is a work that inevitably speaks to and enriches the popular (though seemingly not popular enough) understanding of Palestinian experiences, but Sahhar’s book is also a deeply personal and idiosyncratic work that has little time for soundbite history. If this makes for an occasionally sinuous work, which sifts through memories and reckons with the archive, it is always with a purpose: to show the difficult process of gathering history when the community in question has been deliberately torn apart. What emerges, across forty-eight short and interweaving chapters, is both a rich personal story and an impressive work of scholarship that resists what Sahhar has elsewhere called the “tabula rasa of the settler imagination” (1).

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is sprinkled throughout with both actual photographs and descriptions of them, and the opening image of Abdullah with his car is characteristic of their tone: it is at once striking and enigmatic, evocative and nostalgic. The images hint at a world that did exist but which is now largely lost. The included images often do not correspond to the preceding text or even to the ‘captions’ underneath; rather, they add a texture of what life in Jerusalem was like for Sahhar’s family before the Nakba forced them out of their homes and eventually led some of them to Australia.

This non-linear collage strategy of photographs and text reflects how colonial projects, in killing and displacing people, also displace narrative. Families are rent apart, stories get lost, and memories of the homeland threaten to be forgotten (this is intentional, so that testimony of the injustice might also disappear). Sahhar’s book vigorously resists this erasure of narrative by collecting and preserving the stories of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations. But Find Me at the Jaffa Gate also dramatizes the struggle of completing such a project. Its fragmentary chapters re-enact the fracturing of the Palestinian community by jumping between present day and history, from one character to another, and between versions of events. As readers, we are privy to Sahhar reckoning with the deliberate elimination of her family’s history, and the challenge to “find [her] way back to the unfragmentation of the world as we knew it” (p9). 

This can create an aesthetic discomfort, which is both difficult and valuable. The opening chapters move quickly between an array of family relatives and the reader might struggle to find their footing before being whisked off to another time and place (note there is a partial family tree in the appendix). But the point of writing is not pre-packaged digestibility: having the curtain pulled back allows the reader to actively take part in Sahhar’s project of piecing together her family history. The disorientation itself is valuable; in the essay Recognising the Stranger (2024), Isabella Hammad describes the ethical power of defamiliarization to disrupt the separation between self and other (2). The point at which narrative breaks down, Hammad suggests, is the point at which we are “decentred, when the light of an other appears on the horizon in the project of human freedom, which remains undone” (p56). Thus, the fragmentary form of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate not only literalises the difficulty of piecing together a narrative after forced diaspora, it also creates an ethical space in which writer and reader can empathise and learn in good faith.

Sahhar’s writing is consistently charming. The chapters encompass childhood memories, second-hand stories of her relatives in Jerusalem, contemporary visits to Occupied Palestine and across the world, and archival research. Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem is an occasional motif, being nearby to both a restaurant and a tour company that different relatives of Sahhar ran in the early 20th century. But the real sinews of the book are the people themselves: the generous and broken Ellen, the entrepreneurial George, the gregarious and hard-working Abdullah. 

Throughout, there is an impressive commitment to preserving Palestinian history, even extending to geographical knowledge of landscapes that have since been altered beyond recognition. Sahhar declaims with pride that “you can ask any Palestinian who has never returned in their lifetime, and yet they will describe to you the entrance of their house” (p155).  While physical landmarks have been demolished or dispossessed, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate reinforces a sense of belonging through story. Sahhar’s poignant articulation, “look here, I have built our beautiful home out of words” (p.262, italics in the original) becomes a telos for the work as a whole. The book is imagined as a space for belonging and for resisting settler-colonial displacement. 

While the focus of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is historical, some of Sahhar’s most beautiful prose relates to her own experiences and travels in the present day. There is a moving tribute to the historian Patrick Wolfe, whose spirit, in Sahhar’s rendering, is sensitive and playful. Sahhar writes that Wolfe avows “he never would visit [Palestine] until the time when the Palestinians invited him” (p.111), and they travel there together for a conference not long before Wolfe’s death. Her description of mourning him evokes the grief of the ongoing occupation of Palestine, but it is also touchingly personal:

… all the exchanges that are miscellaneous between two people until one of them dies and then you reify these things and collect them together as something partial and precious. And you regret all the fragments which are intangible and which, like people, are things you can’t keep anywhere but in the unreliable eye of your mind.
(p.108)

Sahhar’s descriptions of loss, displacement, and ethnic cleansing in Palestine cannot help but resonate with the Australian colonial project and dispossession of Aboriginal people. She writes with sensitivity and great empathy about the tension of being a settler at the same time as belonging to a people whose own land has been colonised. Nevertheless, Sahhar argues that comparisons are valuable but “not symmetrical” (p.219): she contends that Israel denies the very identity of Palestinian, whereas in Australia, Aboriginal people are seen to have once existed, but no longer. I’m not convinced by this distinction; both Israel’s chilling persecution of Palestinians and Australia’s own refusal to recognise Aboriginal sovereignty suggest that there is plenty of flexibility, in the colonial imagination, for mounting whatever argument is needed in order to maintain the illusion of a right to the land. In other words, the rhetoric is less important than the function it serves, and in this regard there is much to be gained from reflecting on the experience that Sahhar writes about in the context of the genocide of First Nations people in Australia.

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a generously intimate work of family history and scholarship. Sahhar’s joy and love for Palestine is palpable, and shines through in her lush, poetic prose. The book is, moreover, a politically engaged text, attending to the power of narrative and the ongoing resistance of Palestinian people, including through its consideration of form. It is a gift to the reader that Sahhar realises her project: that people living and dead, and places across the world, “might dwell here together on my page” (p.8). 

Citations

1. Sahhar, M. “Notes Towards the Limits of Imagining.” Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Spring 2025, pp. 98-108. doi: 10.1353/nai.2025.a957111.
2. Hammad, I. Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Penguin, 2024.

FINLEY JAPP (they/he) is a bookseller and student of literature and Spanish living on Wurundjeri country. They write a weekly literary blog for Collins Booksellers Mildura.

The Kool Aid Dispenser 

by David Musgrave

ISBN ‎ 978-1763670150

Recent Works Press

&

Selected Poems, (Black Spring Press Group, 2021)                                

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

Having known David Musgrave and his award-winning poetry since 2005 (when he became Treasurer for Poets Union Inc.), having read with him at a number of Writers’ Festivals over the years, I was delighted to revisit the best of his early work in Selected Poems, compiled and published during the somewhat silent era of Covid.

The first of a number of poems for Musgrave’s father appears here, his early death a recurrent and disturbing preoccupation:

         He has come back.
         He has come from outside himself to assume
         the proportions of dream, in a city of symbols falling
         from deliverance, offered up to speech.                     

(“The Dead”, p.19)

When not in elegiac mood (and sometimes even there), Musgrave displays a quirky sense of humour, language play and inventive wit. These come to the fore in his 2005 collection, On Reflection, a portrait of the poet as a young flaneur, from which eleven representative pieces are selected:

         Transient flesh and the buds of death
         bloom on Mercator window-panes, rippled
         in convex heat, off on the dark road
         of the shivering heart of ugliness                                 

         ……………………………………………

         If it isn’t one thing it’s another,
         laughter without end, enough to make a cat speak.
         And, if the door does not stay shut, it opens
         on an inside that has shrunk and an
         outside that cannot be admitted:
         gnocchi clouds float in a blue soup,
         white noise in the television sky;

(pp. 23-33)

This extended poem deserves to be read in its entirety. Also included are the satiric “Minneapolis”, the wonderful “Lagoon” (which, from memory, won the Poets Union Prize, before David was persuaded to join us) and the full version of “To Thalia”, one of my all-time favourites. These poems are from To Thalia (New Poets 10, Five Islands Press). A small sample of its easy, but subtle and evocative conversational style concludes:

         So here I am on an Erskineville verandah
           under the airborne moss of a jacaranda
         floating above my head at night – and still
           I keep returning to the harbour, jagged

             wet caiman snouting the humid plain
         of Sydney because I can’t be anywhere else.
             Thalia, I’m snookered in this dumb city
         of brilliant hazards, and dull comparisons

         ……………………………………………

                                         But one of these days
         you’ll come waltzing in through the heads
                of my imagination (Krishnamurtri)
         and that will suffice to slay them in the aisles
                and flay the cured hide of this city,
         unearthing at last its pink nascent laughter.      

         (pp.49-50)

Another significant poem from this era is “Watermark” (from Watermark, 2006):

          Never judge a book by its reader
          unless it’s the kind that’s read by touch
          fingers skimming down the columns
          as if shutting dead eyes…………….

          ……………………..In another’s hands,
         the book is something else. Hold up to the light
          the note, the stamp and it will bear witness.       

        (p.63)                        

Moving on to the recent collection, The Kool Aid Dispenser, we find many of the same pre-occupations, similar laid-back satiric approaches, but up-to-date perceptions, especially in the poems including Musgrave’s son, Jingxi:

         Whenever I look at your grandson,
         I see dad’s face, but you’re the one
         or several parts of one, who animates his rage
         and cheek ……….How you would have loved
         to see him, even in your last unravelling,
         the way he pushes away my hand
        if I turn the page too soon, or how
         he will stare blankly ahead, ignoring anything
         I say before slyly looking sideways at me,
         then laughing. It’s hard to believe
         that part of me can go on being, let alone
         this tenacious chain that links to you, here

(“Letter to a Dead Parent”, p.5)

This is followed up, in a later section, with the moving poem “Walking with my young son I remember I am only a year shy of the age my father was when he had his fatal stroke”, a memory that appears to resolve itself in the shared involvement of the energetic afternoon.

Other Central Coast poems follow, punctuated with fine description and environmental awareness. In “Kooranga Dawn”:

          The cool might of morning
          deposes the night casually, like a government
          that falls at a by-election as a trawler returns,
          darkness dropping from its nets.
          ……………… Soon the mass
          of water rhymes with the sky, then veers
          into its own fractured thrall
          as a brahminy kite thermals the gathering sun.         

          (p.55)

In “Warabrook Wetlands”:

          It’s August, cold at the temples.
          I walk home indirectly
                       over the footbridge traversing wetlands and railway
                       each railing like a tyre-iron
          and under each path light
                       a loosening gyre of midges                           

           (p.56)

“Koels to Newcastle,” a delightful Musgrave pun, revisits

                 the trees that come alive at four a.m
          with plangent call after call. The koels come home
          to call the summer in,
          just like the coal which leaves here
          to arc up oceans, dial up the globe.

A neighbour’s house opposite, “rippling upside-down” in the shallows of “a little inland sea/ covering half the road”, calls forth the comment: “It usually costs a bundle for a waterfront view.” (p.60)  

Finally, “How I love thunderstorms” celebrates

                                                              the thrill
          of the cosmic on a domestic scale:
          snipes and spars that rend and boom.
          sheets of light that leap into the night sky
          illuminating our snug insignificance.                  

          (p.62)

For those who’ve been aficionados of David Musgrave’s poetry over several decades, or those wanting to discover where he’s ‘come from’ poetically: 

                                                       if it’s true
          to say I come from somewhere not just
          anywhere south of the imagination

          ……………………………………

          It’s Lagoon with wind-tussocked, wrinkled
          hills worn down to a murmur
          that claims me.                                                    

          (p.36)            

these two recent collections will be a welcome addition to their bookshelves.

MARGARET BRADSTOCK is a Sydney poet, critic and editor. She has been a Senior Lecturer at UNSW, Asialink writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Her poetry is widely published and has won awards, including the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for The Pomelo Tree and the Woollahra Festival Award for Barnacle Rock. Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher &Wattmann, 2024) is her ninth collection.

Plastic Budgie

by Olivia de Zilva

Pink Shorts Press

ISBN: 9781763554146

Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM

Olivia de Zilva’s debut is a memoir told in three strikingly different parts. First, de Zilva takes the reader through her memories of a Chinese Australian childhood, where impressionistic description is juxtaposed with nuggets of heavy-handed familial wisdom, as she navigates the milestones of childhood and adolescence. She then shares her struggle, as a writer, for the correct organizing principle for her story; and finally, reflects on symbols and how they are interpreted. Plastic Budgie does not play to reader expectations for a story about coming of age as a Chinese Australian, though it does delve into many aspects of that experience. It does not deliver a narrative that is safe, predictable or neatly structured, nor does it wrangle together a conventionally satisfying resolution; rather, it puts all the elements of second-generation immigrant memoir on the table and confronts readers with the instability of meaning and with their own expectations of the story.

In the first part, with humour, irony and cynicism, de Zilva recalls a childhood as the daughter of Chinese parents from Hong Kong. Her grandparents’ rules provide a framework for her existence even before she is born, with her mother told not to leave the house for a month after giving birth and not to think about sex while pregnant or the baby will be infertile. She attends an Adelaide school with Anglo Australian kids who bully her, prompting a period of mutism, during which her parents shrug their shoulders when asked if anything traumatic has happened to her. The family is agonisingly aware of the white gaze, with her parents refusing to watch Cantonese dramas ‘as if someone would find out and tell Pauline Hanson’, and her mother embarking on a mission ‘to make me more Australian’ (p 33). References to cultural markers such as Harry Potter and Delta Goodrem locate the reader in Australia in the early 2000s, but de Zilva does not probe this cultural moment, instead segueing fluidly between past and present. She ponders her family’s affliction with ‘purple’ – her mother’s word for her father’s temper – which the author also recognises in herself and interprets as linked to loneliness and bitterness. She refers several times to a curse, before her mother clarifies, ‘the women in our family are cursed with ghosts’ (p. 108), but it is not until later that this trope is deeply explored.

In the second part of Plastic Budgie, de Zilva reflects on what it means to write an ending. Suddenly she is all self-awareness. The reader can orientate herself and see that the genres gestured at in the previous section are now to be unpicked. The sense that we were being given a summary, rather than immersed in a world, crystalises into an interrogation of the sort of narrative the author should write, an acknowledgement of the weight of conflicting expectations, and the struggle to reconcile warring versions of herself. She recalls different drafts with different foci:

First this started out as a series of random events, like when I poured noodles on a family from a balcony in Darwin. At one point, it was a verbatim recount of obsession with horses and the lead singer of The Killers.’ (p. 123)

She then interrogates her preoccupation with doubling, tracing the presence of twinning all through her life from her Western horoscope (Gemini) to her Chinese one (the equally duplicitous rat) and evokes a struggle with ‘the part of me I couldn’t avoid’ (p.130). She asks her grandmother in Hong Kong if there is any way to end a haunting, to which the woman replies simply, ‘No.’ de Zilva juxtaposes Western medical explanations of hereditary illness with her family beliefs about family curses and explores the legacy of being raised with cultural notions that can’t be reconciled with her Western existence. She explores how she has been shaped by her family’s beliefs and muses that her culture does not really acknowledge trauma, unless you count the opera where the swan princess escapes the ugly frog. So, she goes to the one place everything is acknowledged: Reddit.

At this point, I should out myself as an Anglo Australian reader. Despite being half Chinese, I was raised by my Anglo parent, and when I read, I read with Anglo Australian eyes. I was very conscious of this as I was reading Plastic Budgie, particularly as it was pitched to me as a memoir ‘with themes that resonate for many readers’. I wondered if I was positioned wrong to read and respond to the text as intended. While de Zilva’s mother tries to make her more Australian, as a young person my own discomfort was often prompted by the keenness of others (of adults) to engage with me as a Chinese person when I had no sense of myself as any such thing. The further I read, though, the more it seemed that these were exactly the questions the memoir was dragging to the surface. What is an Asian Australian narrative? Who is it written for and who is it read by? Should a writer be defined by her mother or by her father? Is one more of an outsider when viewed as Chinese in Australia, or when viewed as Australian in Hong Kong? How much weight should we give to medical explanations, and does this mean giving correspondingly less weight to more marginal epistemologies? All of this leads to perhaps the biggest question of our times: what counts as truth?

The doubling that de Zilva writes of hints at a discomfort – or split – between the two halves of her identity: Asian and Australian, mother and father, the observer and the observed, the child and the adult, the inheritor of a curse and the recipient of a diagnosis. Such doubling of identity has been a feature of other recent works. I’m thinking of Pip Adam’s Nothing To See, in which each character has dual selves who live parallel lives in two separate bodies. I’m thinking too of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which interrogates the phenomenon of doubling in online, political and cultural life, and what this says about polarised culture. After posting a question on Reddit about her haunting, de Zilva learns that many users feel that it is common for people to be frightened of themselves. She then admits to deleting her search history of mentions of ghosts and hauntings, signalling the shadowing between covert online activity and the curated online self of social media. Again, shades of Klein. Deconstructionist and performative approaches to being Chinese have also been features of other recent Australian works – such as Siang Lu’s Miles Franklin-winning novel, Ghost Cities, in which the protagonist achieves a level of celebrity when #badchinese starts trending, a reference to his failure to perform his Asianness in a way that is acceptable to others.

de Zilva’s bio tells us that she wrote her master’s thesis on representation of Asian-diasporic identity in contemporary Australian publishing, and this interest is explicit throughout the text. It may be that in this post-truth era where information is curated for the individual internet user, and where beliefs are chosen to suit one’s identity or agenda, the unified and linear Asian-Australian narratives of writers like Alice Pung and Li Cunxin are giving way to more meta and internet-based approaches to bicultural identity. Some readers of Plastic Budgie may miss the cohesion of earlier waves of creative non-fiction; others may be heartened that Asian-diasporic experience has moved sufficiently towards the centre that attention can now be focussed on questions of self-representation and the implications of how we tell a story.

FERNANDA DAHLSTROM was born in Melbourne and has made homes in Darwin and Brisbane. She practised law for eight years, in the Northern Territory and Queensland.  Her memoir, The Framing, will be released by MUP in 2026. The manuscript was shortlisted for the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer in 2023 and highly commended in the Next Chapter 2024. Her work has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, Overland Literary Journal, Art Guide Australia and The Guardian. She is currently a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology.

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.