Reviews/Essays

A Blink of Time’s Eye David Adès ISBN 978-1-923248-15-1 5 Islands Press Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON   Life’s Unending Casualties A Blink of Time’s Eye is a gentle book that invites the reader on a journey through Adès’ personal and family history, exploring the notion of time—deep time, the present day, and ancestral time—as it […]

Gold Digger by Lisa Collyer Gazebo Books Life Before Man ISBN 9781763600935 Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI Documentaries, literature, memoirs and oral storytelling projects have contributed to our familiarity with the intersectional identities of woman, worker and Italian migrant. However, these identities are further nuanced and enriched in Lisa Collyer’s second poetry collection. Collyer’s dexterity with […]

The Drama Student by Autumn Royal Giramondo ISBN 9781922725394 Reviewed by PARIS ROSEMONT It is not often one encounters a poetry collection that stays so Desdemona-faithful to the thematic premise of its title. Autumn Royal’s The Drama Student (Giramondo, 2023) delivers. It opens with the poem ‘Causing a scene’, a prologue of sorts to the […]

Thistle by Kate Maxwell ISBN 9781764106870 Recent Works Press   Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK Thistle, Kate Maxwell’s third poetry collection, is a book depicting the trajectory of a life, choosing, as its approach, a dipping in and out of time. The collection is dedicated to the poet’s dead mother, whose late-onset dementia is movingly recalled […]

Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath by S. Shakthidharan Powerhouse ISBN: 9780645530964 Reviewed by SREEPURNA DATTA Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is a sincere attempt to deliver what its title promises. “Tell me all the stories from your life, from the beginning to the end,” asks the author’s son in […]

Cannon Lee Lai Giramondo ISBN 9781923106406 Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD   The first thing I noticed when I received Lee Lai’s Cannon, slipping it out of its envelope in my quiet living room, was how heavy it was. A large, squarish slab, I imagined it could cause some serious damage if it landed on my […]

Peter of Dhirri-aay-aay by Polly Cutmore and David Paull Mehi Books Reviewed by Terry Widders   Peter of Dhirri-aay-aay by Polly Cutmore and David Paull, presents a broad history of the (Indigenous) Gamilraay people, pre-colonial to the present, of a region in north-west NSW (cf. general map on p.55). While the account has an often […]

Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim Cordite Books ISBN 978-0-6457616-6-5 A review by LISA COLLYER Bathypelagia is Debbie Lim’s first poetry collection (a chapbook Beastly Eye  appeared in 2012, with Vagabond Press) and is similarly preoccupied with the blurred line between human animals and wild fauna. If Bathypelagia is read in the context of production of the […]

Growing Up Indian in Australia Edited by Aarti Betigeri, Black Inc Reviewed by MISBAH WOLF   Growing Up Indian in Australia is a collection that resists neat summary. What it offers instead is an accumulation of lived moments—memories, ruptures, negotiations of identity—that sit between cultures, between generations, and between belonging and estrangement. The stories do […]

The Drop Off by David Stavanger Upswell ISBN 978-0-6459840-8-8 Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY David Stavanger’s The Drop Off is a reflection on divorce and shared parenthood and a paean of sorts to his son, interrupted by expressions of world weariness with the institutions of modern capitalism, an alternative alienation, and near-ekphrastic reactions to a painting […]

Hollow Air by Verity Borthwick Ultimo Press ISBN 9781761154195 Reviewed by LUCY CHRISTOPHER When I finished Hollow Air by Verity Borthwick and turned off my tiny reading light, it was suddenly tar-dark and death-quiet. Borthwick’s book had swallowed me; I was still stuck deep underground, navigating dusty tunnels, feeling my hand across sharp rock to […]

The Nightmare Sequence Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed UQP ISBN 9780702268908 Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD   Omar Sakr, readers will already know as an incredibly talented, prolific, and award-winning writer. Yet this collection is beyond, and so crucial in this moment. It is immensely powerful, intense, raw, and immeasurably heavy, yet it is at the […]

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah UQP ISBN 9780702271014 Reviewed by KORALY DIMITRIADIS Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel Discipline is a narrative enquiry into politics, activism, power, and the hierarchies that exist within it through the third-person perspectives of Ashraf, a university academic of Lebanese descent, and Hannah, a journalist of Palestinian descent working for a right-leaning newspaper. […]

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 […]

There is currently in Australia’s literary sector a discussion about fair employment, fair payment for authors, and promises of greater funding with the announcement of the National Cultural Policy by the Arts Minister, Hon. Tony Burke. As Jinghua Qian and Jennifer Mills wrote preliminary to a discussion on superannuation payments for journal contributors: “Many of […]

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 […]