Reviews/Essays

after war by Dženana Vucic UQP ISBN: 9780702271120 Reviewed by Ajla Dizdarević   This is how we learned to love. Gouging flesh, gripping knives. Calling things by other names A memoir in poetic fragments, after war renders the realities of Bosnian War victims grappling with the trauma of what they survived decades later. Refusing to […]

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ Translated by Lin King ISBN: 9781761382338 Scribe Publications Reviewed by CHRISTINE YUNN-YU SUN Taiwan Travelogue, written by Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated into English by Lin King, is the first book originally written in the Chinese language to win the International Booker Award. It is also the first book […]

Capture by Amanda Lohrey TEXT ISBN9781923058842 Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY   Overwhelmed by misinformation spread through news and social media, certainty has been rendered uncertain. The truth is more malleable than ever to the demands of capital and empire.  But irrespective of what is true, we are shaped by what we believe has occurred. In […]

The Strange Matter by Ali Jane Smith Gazebo ISBN 9781763600911 Reviewed by DEBBIE LIM   The cover of Ali Jane Smith’s The Strange Matter is a painting by Phil Day. A jumble of everyday objects appear at close range, almost monumental, unrecognisable. A luminous circular object in the foreground could be an ashtray or the moon. […]

The Northern Tomb By Isabelle Li Puncher and Wattmann ISBN 9781923099821 Reviewed by RAIDAH SHAH IDIL   The Northern Tomb explores three years of the Covid pandemic in Shenyang, a capital city in Northeast China, through the compelling first-person perspectives of Mr Zhao, an elderly widower and retired army official who came from a privileged […]

Crip Stories: An Anthology of Disabled Writers A Mascara Anthology Edited by BS Windon, Laura Pettenuzzo, Misbah Wolf and Katie Hansord NewSouth ISBN 9781761170478 Reviewed by LIEU CHI NGUYEN As politicians debate National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) funding, in the setting of continued inequity for Australians with disabilities, this book could not have been timelier. […]

Frogsong by Melissa Manning University of Queensland Press ISBN: 9780702269233 Reviewed by KATARINA DJERIC     Melissa Manning’s 2026 sophomore novel Frogsong feels like an ode to childhood and the inexorable passing of time that strips us of that innocence of youth. It is a story that lingers in your presence long after finishing it, […]

Year of the Ox by Andrew Brooks Cordite Books ISBN: 9780645761689 Reviewed by DŽENANA VUCIC Like all good communists, Andrew Brooks is an historical materialist as well. So much has been apparent across his work: his Dante-inflected exploration of solidarities in hell, Inferno (2021); the eclectic anthology-cum-study-guide Homework (2021), co-written with his longtime collaborator Astrid […]

The Literate Detective by Paul Scully Bonfire ISBN: 9780645776881   Reviewed by SIMEON KRONENBERG Paul Scully may be described, without irony, as an old-fashioned poet: one for whom the act of writing remains grounded in the aspiration to elevate verse through philosophical reflection, emotional depth, and a sustained attentiveness to language and its meanings. His […]

Elegy, Southwest By Madeleine Watts Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761153136 Reviewed by NINA CULLEY   Elegy, Southwest (2025), winner of the 2026 ALS Gold Medal, arrives as further confirmation of Madeleine Watts’s standing as one of Australia’s most compelling and inventive contemporary novelists. Following The Inland Sea (2020), shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, it extends […]

The Endling  by Keely Jobe SCRIBE ISBN  9781761381782 Reviewed by BEC KAVANAGH   The feminist compound at the heart of Keely Jobe’s debut novel, The Endling, is a flagging utopia that gives the novel a sense of the post-apocalyptic: resources are depleted, shelter is sparse and patience wanes. In reality, the novel takes place from […]

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 […]