Reviews/Essays

Echoes by Shu-Ling Chua SomeKind Press Reviewed by Dženana Vucic   I raced through Echoes the first time I read it. Raced through it the second time, too. At under 85 pages it’s a short book—a chapbook, almost—and easily inhaled over an idle afternoon. If you can resist, the three essays can be spread over […]

The House of Youssef by Yumna Kassab Giramondo ISBN: 9781925818192 Reviewed by SHEILA NGOC PHAM   “The two chairs: tea, coffee, fruit. They discuss the house, banking, they keep away from the future. The birds play in their bath. She thinks of karma and pain and suffering. There is a world beyond this yard and she […]

A History of What I’ll Become  By Jill Jones  ISBN: 978-1-76080-121-2 University of Western Australia Press Reviewed by ERIN McFAYDEN   Jill Jones’s A History of What I’ll Become practices profusion: formally, across its 85 interlocking poems and reams of reference, and affectively, in its oscillation between deep delight and an equally profound sense of […]

Change Machine by Jaya Savige UQP Press ISBN 9780702262869 Reviewed by J. C. MASTERS This is what happens when you binge on beauty: eventually the orgy kills you[.] (‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’, 19) If you’ve ever sat in on a literature class, at some point you may have heard someone mention Charles Baudelaire’s description of […]

A Kinder Sea by Felicity Plunkett UQP ISBN 9780702262708 Reviewed by J.C. Masters Growing up on the coast, I felt like the sea and I were easy and old friends. The water framed my first two decades of life; smeared in sun cream and rash vests, my parents would take me to the beach on […]

The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha ISBN Harvill Secker Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE   Reading Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering during a global pandemic and in a time where all but essential travel within state borders is forbidden is a strange experience. In the author’s acknowledgement included at the end of this book, Paramaditha writes that the […]

Case Notes By David Stavanger UWA Publishing ISBN 978-1-76080-119-9     Reviewed by DAVE CLARK I recently attended a training course that looked into depression. As I sat, sipping on an Earl Grey tea, the presenter went on an acronym spree, throwing them around like a farmer with an excess of seeds. I was beginning […]

Kokomo by Victoria Hannan Hachette ISBN 9780733643323 Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG   In lockdown, distance regained some of its former authority. For six of the last twelve months, many Melburnians have lived, worked and didn’t work within a five kilometre radius of their home. My parents live 22 kilometres away, and though there isn’t a […]

Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe UQP Reviewed by KATELIN FARNSWORTH     ‘Meriem hopes that her wounds too will mend, that her jagged edges and disfigured depths will fade. Disappear. That one day she is restored enough to abide a loved one’s touch upon her skin’ I like stories that are raw, unflinching […]

Entries by Prithvi Varatharajan ISBN: 9780648511632 Cordite Reviewed by MIRIAM WEI WEI LO     Reading Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries, is like tuning in to an erudite conversation. At first my brain struggles. Then, like a middle-aged woman on the tenth day of exercise boot-camp, I suddenly find myself keeping up. Twelve poems in, I’m not […]

The Tiniest House of Time By Sreedhevi Iyer Wild Dingo Press 9781925893069 Reviewed by JENNNIFER MACKENZIE “How will you remember her?” “As someone who knew so much, and kept it well hidden.” (316) Sreedhevi Iyer’s The Tiniest House of Time is a book for our time, examining as it does the profound silences that a […]

A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina By Paul Kane White Crane Books ISBN 978-0-648337-11-9 Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY   “Paul Kane is a poet, critic, scholar and librettist” who splits his time between Australia (principally rural Victoria) and the USA and is well-known in the former as a driving force in the Mildura Writers Festival, […]

Dry Milk By Huo Yan (trans. Duncan M. Campbell) Giramondo ISBN 978-1-925336-99-3 Reviewed by MAKS SIPOWICZ Huo Yan’s Dry Milk is a book about many things all at once. It is a meticulous character study of an unpleasant man who never quite settles in a new country. It is a philosophical parable about following the […]

Toward the End By Ali Alizadeh Giramondo ISBN 978-1-925818-22-2 Reviewed by KIRAN BHAT While it was a mainstay of early 20th century writing, the styles, tendencies, and structures of social realist literature went out of vogue fairly quickly. Perhaps it is because of the proselytising nature of such texts, or because works of only one […]

Turbulence By Thuy On UWA Publishing ISBN 978-1-76080-119-9 Reviewed by JACKIE SMITH If you pay attention to the nation’s arts sector, you’re probably familiar with Thuy On. For many years, she has worked as a freelance writer and arts critic with The Age and The Saturday Paper and Books+Publishing as well as holding the books editor […]

Heide By π.O. Giramondo ISBN 9781925818208 Reviewed by ABIGAIL FISHER   Trying unsuccessfully to write this review in June, I ride alongside the Eastern Freeway to Bulleen. The gallery is closed but I visit the bees, the bare trees, the corrugated cows. Plaques along the path by the river gloss over the Wurundjeri history of Bolin […]