Reviews/Essays

The Discomfort of Self-Recognition For many years, books have documented the literary rivalries of writers—Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, A. S. Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble—but Gabrielle Carey’s novella length book Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall (2018) is the first I’ve read to examine […]

Hijabi in Jeans by Isil Cosar Guillotine Press ISBN 978-0-6481693-3-8 Reviewed by ZOYA PATEL From the very first poem, it is clear that Hijabi In Jeans by H.I. Cosar is a deeply personal, and deeply political collection, entwining the two themes to carry through every piece. Cosar, a Turkish-Australian teacher and writer has spoken of […]

The World Was Whole By Fiona Wright Giramondo ISBN: 978-1-925336-97-9 Reviewed by GABRIELLA MUNOZ   With four published books, poet, essayist and critic Fiona Wright has become an important voice in the Australian literary scene. Born in 1983 in New South Wales, Wright published her first collection of poems, Knuckled, in 2011. In it, she […]

On Patrick White by Christos Tsiolkas ISBN 9781863959797 Black Inc Reviewed by Jean-François Vernay “Perhaps, in spite of Australian critics, writing novels was the only thing I could do with any degree of success, even my half-failures were some justification of an otherwise meaningless life.” ——- Paul Brennan & Christine Flynn  If one were to pool […]

No Friend But The Mountains by  Behrouz Boochani translated by Omid Tofighian Picador ISBN: 9781760555382 Reviewed by HOA PHAM Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, playwright and activist whose book, No Friend But the Mountain was written by text message over a couple of years on Manus Prison. The resulting work is a powerful, readable […]

All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópulos translated by Alice Whitmore ISBN : 9781925336412 Giramondo Reviewed by Jeffrey Errington   In 1907 after living and writing in Europe since he was a young man, Henry James, aged a pinch below 60, sat down at his desk in New York and decided that that writing a novel […]

Mosaics from the Map by Robyn Rowland ISBN: 978-1-907682-62-9 Doire Press Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE In 2015, Robyn Rowland published two books which seemed to be career-defining moments for her. They were the bilingual This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Chanakkale 1915 (originally with Five Island Press in Melbourne and now republished by Spinifex) and Line of Drift […]

No Country Woman: A Memoir of Not Belonging By Zoya Patel Hachette ISBN: 978 0 7336 4006 3 Reviewed by TAMARA LAZAROFF Zoya Patel’s No Country Woman: A Memoir of Not Belonging is a collection of twelve memoir essays that explore the experience of growing up as a migrant and person of colour in Australia […]

Dark Matters by Susan Hawthorne Spinifex ISBN: 9781925581089 Reviewed by MEL O’CONNOR In counterpoint to how these histories have been silenced and extinguished, Susan Hawthorne, in Dark Matters, testifies to the horrifying reality of abduction and torture of lesbians—especially outspoken activist lesbians, such as Kate, the central character of the text. This is not a quiet […]

Light Borrowers: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2018 Foreword by Isabelle Li Brio Books ISBN: 9781925589627 Review by BEEJAY SILCOX   “In the beginning, it was just us and the words,” writes University of Technology Sydney (UTS) student –and writer – EM Tasker. “We sang them into being, and they existed only in our minds. They reproduced […]

Renga: 100 Poems by John Kinsella and Paul Kane GloriaSMH Reviewed by SIOBHAN HODGE   Renga: 100 Poems is a collection over ten years in the making. Paul Kane and John Kinsella, writing in exchange via the Japanese renga form, have compiled a long-running poetic dialogue – unlike traditional renga, each poem is individually written […]

deciBels3  Vagabond 2018 Edited by Michelle Cahill & Dimitra Harvey Launched by EMILY STEWART How to mobilise the launch speech? An essay in the form of a thread I have been metabolising Michelle Cahill’s work on interceptionality, a term she has been dissecting and championing over three essays with the Sydney Review of Books, the […]

From cultures of violence to ways of peace: reading the Benedictus in the context of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers in offshore detention Revised version of a paper given at ‘Things That Make for Peace: Peace and Sacred Texts Conference’, hosted by School of Theology & Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation, Charles Sturt University, […]

João by John Mateer Giramondo, 2017 ISBN:978-1-925336-62-7 Reviewed by BONNY CASSIDY   Speaking recently in Adelaide, the expatriate Australian theorist Sneja Gunew proposed that nations are the museums of identity. I took her to mean that, regardless of our status as foreigner/visitor or citizen/member, we tour them—we observe national identity being curated and performed. But […]

Empty Chairs by Liu Xia. Translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern; Introduction by Liao Yiwu; Foreword by Herta Müller Graywolf Press, 2015 ISBN 978-1-5559772-5-2 Reviewed by RAVI SHANKAR On April 1st, 2018—that rare conjunction of Easter Sunday with April Fool’s day in the West—Chinese painter, photographer and poet Liu Xia celebrated […]

The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-Yi, Translated by Darryl Sterk ISBN: 9781925498554. Text Publishing 2017. Reviewed by CHRISTINE SUN Award-winning novelist Wu Ming-Yi is perhaps the only Taiwanese author ever invited to the Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) in the past two decades. It seems easy to forget the island democracy ever exists, for any attempt […]

Lunar Inheritance by Lachlan Brown Giramondo, 2017 ISBN 978-1-9253363-8-2 Reviewed by NICHOLAS JOSE One of the titles in Lachlan Brown’s new book is ‘(sorites and another traveller’s song)’. The parenthesis is a sign of casual deflection. The title of the poem is an add-on. It could be something else. But actually it provides a good […]

Modern Chinese poetry begins with its turn away from classical Chinese poetry in the early twentieth century. This turn saw the adoption of the vernacular and the move away from classical forms. Yet the history of modern Chinese poetry does not mimic the trajectory of Western modernist and post-modernist experimentations. In particular, the years between […]

Middle of the Night by HC Hsu Deerbrook Editions, 2015. ISBN 978-0-9904287-4-9 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET HC Hsu’s essay work, Middle of the Night, is part of what might be called Asian American experimental literature, that combines elements pertaining to the migrant experience with avant-garde forms and styles of writing, such as prose poetry, without subsuming the […]

On Exile—Inner, and Outer: A Tibetan Odyssey in Coming Home to Tibet: a Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (Shambhala Boulder, 2016) by Martin Kovan As its title suggests, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s Coming Home to Tibet (Shambhala, 2016) is a memoir of exile with something of a difference: the return to […]