Reviews/Essays

Genre of The Poison of Polygamy by Qiuping Lu The Poison of Polygamy  Wong Shee Ping and translated by Ely Finch Sydney University Press  ISBN: 9781743326022   Editors’ note: This research essay references Ely Finch’s recently published translation of The Poison of Polygamy (2019). While not a review of the book, the essay offers a point […]

Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics by Tong King Lee Brill ISBN: 978-90-04-29338-0 Reviewed by A.J. CARRUTHERS Debates have been raging, in avant-garde studies, over the terms that we might deploy to describe such cultural productions and the longevity of such terms. How do we name unusual literatures in the near present? “Avant-garde” or “neo-avant-garde,” […]

Encounters with Asian Decolonisation by David Fettling Australian Scholarly Publishing ISBN 978-1-925588-13-2 Reviewed by PETER GIBSON Encounters with Asian Decolonisation compels us to rethink Australia’s place in Asia’s past through the work of individual Australian government officials in Asia after World War Two. In this first book for David Fettling, which is based on a […]

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang Penguin  ISBN 9780399589386 Reviewed by JENEVIEVE CHANG “We hate soft peaches. We hate soft, sweet peaches and we love hard, sour plums,” mother tells daughter in “We Love You Crispina”, the first story in Jenny Zhang’s tender, brutal and deceptively artless Sour Heart, a collection of narratives about the immigrant […]

Billy Sing by Ouyang Yu Transit Lounge ISBN: 978-0-9953594-4-4 Reviewed by BEIBEI CHEN     Born in 1886 to an English mother and Chinese father, William ‘Billy’ Sing and his two sisters were brought up in Clermont and Proserpine, in a rural part of Queensland. Sing’s father was a drover and his grandfather was a […]

Argosy and Lost Lake by Bella Li ISBN 978-1-922181-96-1 ISBN 978-1-925735-18-5 Vagabond Press Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE A publishing highlight of 2017 was the appearance of Bella Li’s Argosy, and this has been followed by the recent release of Lost Lake. By introducing an intriguing blend of collage, photography and sparely-written text, the poet has […]

New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham Edited and Introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly UWA Publishing, 2017 ISBN 978-1-7425892-0-6 Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD The significance, value, and breadth of Anna Wickham’s poetry extends beyond categories of nation and resists the limitations of such categories. The category of woman, however, is central to her poetics, as both […]

Hidden Words Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar Edited by Lucas Stewart and Alfred Birnbaum British Council ISBN 978-0-86355-877-1 Reviewed by MARTIN KOVAN I. Hidden Words Hidden Worlds, an anthology of short fiction from contemporary Myanmar (Burma), is unusual in many senses. It assembles the work of seven established Burmese-language writers, and the same number of […]

The Lost Culavamsa: or the Unimportance of Being Earnest about Aryan & Dravidian a play, by Ernest Macintyre Vigitha Yapa Publications (Colombo, Sri Lanka), 2018 ISBN 978-955-665-319-9 Reviewed by ADAM RAFFEL     In February 2016, in the best traditions of suburban amateur theatre, a group of Sydneysiders of Sri Lankan background performed a play […]

These Wild Houses by Omar Sakr Cordite Press ISBN: 9780975249277 Reviewed by BEN HESSION In a departure from most poetry books, the series issued by Cordite Publishing features a preface by the poet, as well as an introduction by an established writer, who in Omar Sakr’s case is his mentor and tutor, Judith Beveridge. Unlike the […]

Can You Tolerate This by Ashleigh  Young Giramondo ISBN : 9781925336443 Reviewed by MARTIN EDMOND Can You Tolerate This? is a collection of twenty-one personal essays on a variety of seemingly disparate subjects; some just a few hundred words long; others more than thirty pages. All are highly accomplished, both stylistically and in terms of […]

Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria by Brian Castro Giramondo Publishing 224pp, $26.95 ISBN 978-1-925336-22-1 Reviewed by JOSEPH CUMMINS Brian Castro’s eleventh work of fiction is a profoundly playful novel about life, death and authorship. Faced with a terminal diagnosis, Lucien Gracq contemplates the meaning and meaninglessness of life as a town planner. Given fifty-three days […]

Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark by Catherine Cole ISBN 9781742589503 UWA Publishing Reviewed by CAROLINE VAN DE POL ‘The Brain – is wider than the Sky -,’ wrote Emily Dickinson revealing our capacity to expand our mind beyond experience to imagination. Acclaimed American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson recently recapped this magical opening of the […]

The Circle and the Equator By Kyra Giorgi UWA Publishing ISBN 978-1-74258-923-7 Review by VIVIENNE GLANCE   To find a collection of short stories so perfectly themed as The Circle and the Equator is a rare gift. These stories take us on a grand tour of the world, shifting in time, with each location bound […]

Sentences from the Archive By Jenn Webb Recent Work Press, 2016 ISBN: 9780995353800 Reviewed by ANNELISE ROBERTS “I peeled apples and sliced them finger-nail deep, waking you with their scent” (1): Jen Webb’s Sentences from the Archive (Recent Work Press, 2016) begins with the pastel erotic vignette ‘Outside the Orchard’. It’s like a favourite private memory […]

A Personal History of Vision By Luke Fischer ISBN 978-1-74258-938-1 UWAP Poetry, 2017 Reviewed by DOMINIQUE HECQ Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand, O to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of […]

False Nostalgia by Aden Rolfe Giramondo ISBN 978-1-922146-99-1 Reviewed by BRIANNA BULLEN     ‘Anamnesis,’ the first poem and section of Aden Rolfe’s brilliant philosophical poetry collection, refers to Plato’s concept of learning as a process of recovering knowledge from within.  This poem presents an initial simple supposition: “We who we are because of / what […]

Knocks by Emily Stewart Vagabond Press ISBN 978-1-922181-71-8 Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD   There has been an important groundswell of recent feminist poetries and poetics in Australia. As Siobhan Hodge wrote in her review of Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s anthology Contemporary Feminist Poetry, there is: …a subtle, cresting sense of activism. It is there […]

Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón translated by Mario Licón Cabrera Vagabond Press Reviewed by ROSE HUNTER The Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón presents the work of three contemporary Mexican poets, one born in 1968 (Bojórquez), one in 1979 (Lamas), and one in 1982 (Calderón), translated by the […]

Preparations for Departure by Nathanael O’Reilly UWA Publishing ISBN: 9781742589459 Reviewed by ZACHARY WARD   Preparations for Departure, Nathanael O’Reilly’s second full length collection, is an ongoing journey in which the poet enters the gaps between home and abroad, contentment and discontent, presence and absence, youth and age, the past and the present. These disparities emerge […]