Reviews/Essays

On David Malouf Nam Le Black Inc, 2019 ISBN 9781760640392 Reviewed by JEAN-FRANCOIS VERNAY   “Identity can be experienced in two ways. Either as a confident being-in the-world or as anxiety about our-place-in-the-world; as something we live for ourselves, or as something that demands for its confirmation the approval of others.” David Malouf (1) Published […]

Traverse by Tineke Van der Eecken Wild Weeds Press ISBN 978-0648320678 Reviewed by SAMANTHA TRAYHURN       Traverse by Tineke Van Der Eecken is a novel about the micro-offences that culminate in the end of a marriage. Physical distance and emotional distance. Wandering minds, snide remarks, broken trust. Part travel memoir, part personal reflection, […]

Sergius Seeks Bacchus by Norman Erikson Pasaribu translated by Tiffany Tsao Giramondo ISBN:9781925818109 Reviewed by DMETRI KAKMI Born to a Muslim father and a Protestant mother, Norman Erikson Pasaribu was raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, but his roots lie in the ethnic Christian Batak community of Sumatra. Though he writes in Indonesian, Pasaribu’s poetry collection Sergius […]

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell Black Inc. ISBN: 9781760640958 Review by TAMARA LAZAROFF     Wordslut, as the ironic title suggests, is a book about language, gender and power by debut author, Amanda Montell, an LA-based self-professed linguistics nerd, feminist and also magazine features editor. It’s no […]

The Grass Library by David Brooks Brandl and Schlesinger ISBN 978-0-6482026-4-6 Reviewed by JACK STANTON “If only ethics operated on the one plane,” (137), David Brooks laments in The Grass Library, which, like his previous work, evades neat classification but falls somewhere in between memoir and philosophy. On one level, The Grass Library urges his […]

Prisoncorp by Marlee Jane Ward ISBN: 9781925589542 Brio Books Reviewed by Fernanda Dahlstrom       Prisoncorp is the third volume in a young adult speculative fiction trilogy that engages with issues in contemporary Australian society. Marlee Jane Ward posits a near-future setting where current legal and economic trends have gone to an extreme, but which […]

Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko University of Queensland Press ISBN: 978 0 7022 5996 8 Reviewed by CAITLIN WILSON   Talking Back: Too Much Lip, Melissa Lucashenko If this book were a sound, it would be the roar of a motorcycle down an empty road; bold, and for the moments when it’s in your […]

Lucida Intervalla by John Kinsella ISBN:  9781760800079 UWAP Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE     Can art make things happen? John Kinsella says ‘yes’. ‘Poetry functions more directly in cultures at different times, but it is part of most things we do. Consciousness of poetic language informs reading the newspaper as much as it does listening to […]

Calenture by Lindsay Tuggle ISBN: 9780648056812 Cordite Publishing Reviewed by HELEN GILDFIND   The striking title of Lindsay Tuggle’s poetry collection is immediately defined in her preface: Calenture, n: A fever incident to sailors within the tropics, characterised by delirium in which the patient fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap […]

Stone Mother Tongue by Annamaria Weldon ISBN: 9781742589930 UWAPublishing Reviewed by LINDSAY TUGGLE     Resurrecting the Oracle: Stone Mother Tongue Annamaria Weldon’s luminous fourth collection returns the poet to the archipelago of her birth.  Stone Mother Tongue begins in prehistoric Malta, where Weldon mourns the “goddesses we trample[ed]” across the centuries.  The poet guides us […]

Glass Life by Jo Langdon 5Islands Press ISBN: 9780734054272 Reviewed by WILLIAM FARNSWORTH   On opening the first pages of Jo Langdon’s second collection, Glass Life, one might, at first, have the sense of reading through a poet’s travelogue. Among the first few poems there are descriptions of the modernist Hauptbahnhof station in Berlin or […]

Vishvarūpa by Michelle Cahill ISBN 978-07340-4205-7 5 Islands Press, 2011 second edition UWAPublishing  ISBN: 9781760800352 Launch Speech by JUDITH BEVERIDGE As Michelle tells us in the notes, Vishvarūpa is a Sanskrit word meaning: manifold, having all forms and colours. This aspect of diversity is beautifully played out in Michelle’s book. She ranges from different locales in […]

out of emptied cups by Anne Casey ISBN: 978-1-912561-74-2 Salmon Poetry Launched by ELEANOR HOOKER The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote poetry is a ‘dividend from what you know and what you are’. I am going to tell you about Anne Casey, the person, things I imagine you already know – Anne is a powerhouse, […]

Jungle Without Water and Other Stories by Sreedhevi Iyer Gazebo Books ISBN: 9780987619143 Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA     The good things in this collection of short stories, Jungle Without Water, are very good indeed. But before talking about some of them in detail I want to briefly touch on the major theme of […]

The short story of you and I by Richard James Allen UWAPublishing ISBN 9781760800215 Reviewed by Kyra Bandte At first, The short story of you and I by Richard James Allen seems to exist in the liminal space between awake and asleep; the space where your psyche turns the familiar sound and scene around you into […]

The Red Pearl and Other Stories By Beth Yahp Vagabond Press, 2017 ISBN 978-1-922181-51-0 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET Australian, Malaysian-born writer Beth Yahp’s short story collection The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017) navigates between different locations and time periods. It is resolutely transnational and transhistorical in nature. At times, the collection veers towards the […]

Down The Hume by Peter Polites Hachette, 2017 ISBN:9780733635564 Reviewed by HAROLD LEGASPI   There is not a simple matter of homogenous ‘queer’ voice, literary or otherwise (Hurley, 2010). As poststructuralist theorists have contended, for various historical and social reasons, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are discursively unstable and contested categories (Jagose, 2002) and homosexuality is ‘a […]

Coach Fitz by Tom Lee Giramondo ISBN : 9781925336900 Reviewed by JAKE GOETZ   Ever since the Little Athletics of my youth, I’ve always felt Australia to be a sporting nation. One that if viewed from an alien planet, could be mistaken as preparing for war through daily gym appointments, jogs and football. From my […]

The Artist’s Portrait by Julie Keys ISBN 9780733640940 Hachette Reviewed by VICTORIA NUGENT The Artist’s Portrait by Julie Keys, is not an easy novel to categorise. It’s not exactly a page turner but it simmers along with a slow sense of intrigue. It’s not quite a murder mystery, not quite drama, not quite historical fiction. […]

Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos translated by Alice Whitmore ISBN 9781925336962 Giramondo Reviewed by SAMANTHA TRAYHURN     We’re alone together, for the first time. I have to touch him now. I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder. But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest the way they said it would… (p.1). There […]