Reviews/Essays

Desolation by Hossein Asgari Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761154133 Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA   In 1988, civilian flight Iran Air 655 was shot down by U.S. Navy guided missiles while on its daily route from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. All 290 passengers and crew onboard were killed. An investigation into the incident found a succession of […]

Astraea by Kate Kruimink Weatherglass Books ISBN: 9781739570767 Reviewed by FERGUS EDWARDS   Astraea is set on board a ship transporting female convicts from England in the early 1800s. We do not see them depart, and we will not see them arrive: they will never be on solid ground. The crew is entirely male, the […]

The Vegetarian 채식주의자 by Han Kang translated by Deborah Smith Granta ISBN: 9781846276033 Reviewed by JASMINE DARWIN   Does Eating Meat Make You Squirm? Try Going Without It. No, Really  Set in contemporary South-Korea, The Vegetarian, 채식주의자 written by Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith, is a gripping novel that follows one woman’s slow descent […]

Two Hundred Million Musketeers Ender Başkan Giramondo ISBN 9781923106482 Reviewed by BRIAN OBIRI-ASARE One of the distinct pleasures of reading poetry is when the fluidities of sense awaken the senses of meaning. When poems reach for this sweet spot, when language is so taut, so refined, it’s able to suggest – even trigger – unknown […]

still back water by Simeon Kronenberg, Pitt Street Poetry ISBN 978-1-922776-22-8 Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY Laura (Riding) Jackson and Robert Graves counsel, in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, that a poem is an entity in itself and should be read as such. (1) So, too, a collection, presumably. While these counsels undoubtedly ring true for […]

A Savage Turn Luke Patterson Magabala Books Hachette ISBN: 9781922777928 Reviewed by MICHAEL GRIFFITHS The opening poem of the third and final section of Luke Patterson’s A Savage Turn sees the speaker partly attached to but mostly scathing about his place of birth, Kurnell—the suburb of Sydney’s Sutherland shire that sits at the location of […]

An Onslaught of Light Natasha Rai Pantera Press ISBN 9780648619093 Reviewed by NINA CULLEY   Natasha Rai’s debut novel An Onslaught of Light opens with Archana, or “Arch” as she is known, stepping onto Sydney’s tarmac, breathing in the damp heat. It’s immediately clear that avoidance is her go-to: she declines a call from her […]

How to Dodge Flying Sandals  Daniel Nour Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781923046573 Reviewed by THUY ON   There is a trajectory that is followed by most memoirists: the incremental build-up of many unhappy happenstances that lead to the peak of anguish and an epiphany of sorts before lessons are duly learned and a hard-won resolution […]

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood, Jackie Wang SemioText(e)/Penguin 9781635901924 Reviewed by TIMMAH BALL Who is the type of person who writes books?  Channel that violence. I want to live in language in a way that makes sense to me. I want to use these words in a way that […]

A reading and conversation with Belle Ling and Judith Beveridge August 18th, 2025 Better Read than Dead   I would like to pay my respects to the traditional owners, the Gadigal people, their elders past present and emerging. I thank them for their laws, their languages and their cultures and acknowledge that sovereignty was never […]

these memories require  Jacinta Le Plastrier Puncher & Wattmann ISBN: 9781923099661 Reviewed by PARIS ROSEMONT   Jacinta Le Plastrier’s these memories require is a delicately woven poetry collection blending emotion and intellect whilst pressing on the bruises of trauma and memory. It traverses complex terrain, from lived experience to the ethically observed, through to remnants […]

Salsa in the Suburbs by Alejandra Martinez ISBN 9781923099630 Puncher and Wattmann Reviewed by ALISON STODDART Immigration has always been a topic on the Australian socio-political agenda.  A talking point that affects all members of our multicultural society and can be heard everywhere, from offices to cafes, gyms to hairdressers. There is no doubt that it […]

Joss: A History Grace Yee Giramondo ISBN:9781923106314 Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON   Grace Yee’s Joss: A History challenges contemporary poetry readers with the unspoken premise ‘How far can we deconstruct history to examine and understand it?’ Yee’s Joss takes up the mantle of a documentary poet (docu-poet) such as Pasiley Rekdal, who in West: A […]

Hailstones Fell Without Rain by Natalia Figueroa Barroso University of Queensland Press ISBN: 9780702268816 Reviewed by ANNA MERLO   Hailstones Fell Without Rain is a complex story of culture, immigration, sacrifice and, above all else, love. Natalia Figueroa Barroso’s debut novel takes a tri-partite form, with a brief interlude, following the lives of Grachu, Chula […]

Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea by Natalie Harkin Wakefield Press Reviewed by SAMUEL COX   It is not merely the spaces we inhabit in the present, nor the connections we hold, which give us our sense of self, there is another unstable and contested dimension which stretches away from us and back into the present to inflect […]

Stories of the Tanganekald Jacob Stengle 2021 ALLSA Reviewed by SAMUEL COX Emu and Brolga © Jacob Stengle 2021 “From time immemorial” – David Unaipon   For the first time, Stories of the Tanganekald: a collection of ancient stories from the Coorong, South Australia shares the narratives of the Tanganekald, a language of the Ngarrindjeri […]

The Office of Literary Endeavours                                                                                                 1. Mark Roberts 5 Islands Press 2025 ISBN 9781923248090   Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK   In his third poetry book, The Office of Literary Endeavours, Mark Roberts embraces many interlinked themes, dealing mainly with the relationship of the poet, or any individual, to the land we stand upon. The eponymous […]

Lithosphere Ben Walter Puncher & Wattmann ISBN: 9781923099685 Reviewed by ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN   Ben Walter’s poetry collection sits between a rock and a hard place. It’s difficult to do nature writing without tumbling into a didactic crevasse, or bathing in the seductive, never-ending wellspring of descriptive language. But the poems that Walter hews together are curiously […]

Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell Little Puss Press ISBN: 9781964322995 Reviewed by KAYA WILSON A reaching, layered and tender rejection of the rules-based essay It was in the early panic of Trump’s second term- when the trans podcasts I listen to were discussing the contents of their Go bags, the Executive Orders were […]

Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty  Duke University Press (2025) ISBN: 978-1-4780-3222-9 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s latest book published in 2025 by Duke University Press is an event in itself, if only because her previous and only other book was published more than twenty years ago in 2003 by the […]