Reviews/Essays

The Burning Elephant by Christoher Raja Giramondo ISBN 978-1-922146-92-2 Book Launch Speech by NICHOLAS JOSE   Asia Pacific Writers & Translators Guangzhou Kuei Yuan Café Gallery 24 November 2016 Who would have thought I would be launching Chris Raja’s beautiful book here in Guangzhou? Such is the river of life that flows into the ocean […]

Autobiochemistry by Tricia Dearborn UWAP, 2019 ISBN 978-1-76080-022-2 Reviewed by ROSE LUCAS     What are the elements – multiple, multivalent – which constitute and compose us as individuals, as bodies in time and place? What are the factors which make each of us precisely who we are, as well as who we might become? […]

AXIS Book I: ‘Areal’ by a.j. carruthers Vagabond Press ISBN: 978-1-922181-32-9 Reviewed by TERRI ANN QUAN SING Ambitious beyond itself; larger than the sum of a single collection; AXIS is a ‘lifelong long poem’; it is the first book-length installment spanning axes one through thirty-one. Since the publication of AXIS Book I: ‘Areal’ an additional eighteen […]

The Book of Thistles by Noëlle Janaczewska Review by VIVIENNE GLANCE ISBN: 978 174 258 8049 UWA Publishing “Plants that stand for us that stand for themselves as we stand for ourselves.” P. 164 These lines appear around half-way through Noëlle Janaczewska’s The Book of Thistles. They are an apt summary of this ‘part accidental […]

Rain Birds By Harriet McKnight ISBN 9781863959827 Black Inc Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA Harriet McKnight’s brilliant, moving novel reminded me of a book I had read a long time before, in 2006. That was Kate Legge’s The Unexpected Elements of Love, a novel that explores some of the same themes that McKnight incorporates into […]

Journey to Horseshoe Bend by T.G.H. Strehlow ISBN : 978-1-922146-77-9 Giramondo Reviewed by JAMES PAULL If not for the Christian gravesite, the book-cover image of Central Australia might appear an all too familiar trope. Industries as much cultural as primary have engaged in modes of wealth extraction from this landscape. In mid-century modernist mythography, for […]

The Measure of Skin by Ramon Loyola Vagabond Press ISBN 978-1-925735-14-7 Reviewed by FELICITY PLUNKETT Poets have recurrent signatures – words, images, modes and motifs – imprints unique as a fingerprint’s whorl. For Philippines-born poet, editor, lawyer and writer of short fiction, Ramon Loyola, one of these is just this: images of skin, literal and figurative, […]

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, […]