Reviews/Essays

The Passenger Seat Vijay Khurana Ultimo Press ISBN 9781761153792 Reviewed by NINA CULLEY   Masculinity and Isolation in Vikay Khurana’s The Passengers’ Seat In the summer of 2019, two teenagers drove across British Columbia, leaving behind a strange scene: a cryptic goodbye message, a torched pick-up truck, McDonald’s French fries and cans of Red Bull […]

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 […]

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 […]

Human/Nature by Jane Rawson UNSW Press ISBN 9781761170010 Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY   To encounter the natural world with certainty is to remove yourself from the expansive potential of its indeterminacy. As we move through this period of reckoning with humanity’s impact on the planet, answers feel like everything—like a necessity—but throughout Human/Nature, Jane Rawson […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Me, Her, Us by Yen Rong Wong UQP ISBN 9780702266201 Reviewed by ZHI YI SAW Me, Her, Us, by award-winning non-fiction writer and art critic Yen-Rong Wong, is her debut collection of memoir-essays that centres around her investigation and views of various relationships: Her own with sex (Me), her relationship with her mother (Her), and […]

The World With Its Mouth Open Zahid Rafiq Tin House ISBN 9781959030850 Reviewed by AASHNA JAMAL The men are restrained and evasive, the women are waiting for something that never arrives. A sense of resignation pervades the eleven short stories in Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story book collection, The World With Its Mouth Open published […]

Politica                                                                                                by Yumna Kassab Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761152009 […]