Reviews/Essays

Constitution by Amelia Dale Inken Publisch, 2017 ISBN 9780987142351 Reviewed by TONY MESSENGER Ben Lerner in his 2016 essay “The Hatred of Poetry” reminds us of poetry’s activist, historical participation in politics; “Plato, in the most influential attack on poetry in recorded history, concluded that there was no place for poetry in the Republic because […]

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body By Roxane Gay  Hachette ISBN: 978-1-4721-5111-7 Review by HAYLEY SCRIVENOR       Roxane’s Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is an obsessive book in many ways. It’s an obsessiveness that characterises the relationship that I, and many women I know, have with our bodies. It’s also an […]

A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan TEXT ISBN: 9781925498035 Reviewed by JOSHUA POMARE ‘Garner has always been a boundary-crosser. Refusing the constraints of literary genre she has sought to write across and craft her own versions of them’ – Bernadette Brennan. It is at these boundaries, the rough torn edges […]

Writing to the Wire Edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen UWA Press ISBN  9781742588667 Reviewed by ALICE ALLAN To live on the Australian continent is to be aware of the people who are excluded from it—those who are currently incarcerated in places coolly dubbed ‘detention centres’. Writing to the Wire, edited by Dan Disney […]

Exhibits of the Sun by Stephen Edgar Black Pepper  ISBN 978 1 876044 88 6 Reviewed by DAVID GILBEY ‘… the sinople eye of a butterfly wing …’ Sarah Howe Edgar’s poetry is like that – detailed, deceptive, minutely crafted, significant and changing – implicating both the watcher and the watched. In Sarah Howe’s ‘Two Systems’ […]

We Need New Names By NoViolet Bulawayo Vintage Books ISBN 970099581888 Reviewed by HAYLEY SCRIVENOR We Need New Names is a work of literary fiction about hunger of all kinds. Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel begins in Budapest. Darling, an eleven-year-old girl, runs with her friends through a community of gated houses (named for the Hungarian […]

Fragments by Antigone Kefala Giramondo ISBN 978-1-925336-19-1 Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY Stark, radiant imagery; lean punctuation; the slightly disorienting effect of the syntax; an imaginative vision of sensuous waking life enmeshed in subterranean realms of memory and dream, struck me on my first encounter with Australian poet Antigone Kefala’s work: an English-Greek bilingual edition I […]

Annihilation of Caste B.R. Ambedkar UWA Publishing  ISBN 9781742588018 Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD When I was living in Chembur (Bombay) in 2016, there was a statue of a portly and bespectacled B. R. Ambedkar at the end of my street. This suggests he has been lionised in India, if not quite canonised, something aided in […]

Bull Days by Tina Giannoukos Arcadia Press ISBN Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE Tina Giannoukos’s first book, In a Bigger City (Five Islands Press 2005), was a highly evocative and rather unsparing portrait of Melbourne at the time. The observations were close and clear-eyed, the tone generally colloquial. There was also a considerable social range in […]

The Blue Decodes by Cassie Lewis Grand Parade Poets Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE The Blue Decodes is the latest collection in a now considerable list from Grand Parade Poets, going back to 2011. It’s a diverse stable ranging from young avant-gardists (such as the late Benjamin Frater) through to Selected Poems from well-established, but somewhat […]

A Chinese Affair by Isabelle Li Margaret River Press ISBN 9780994316769 Reviewed by GAY LYNCH In 2016, I met short story writer and poetry translator Isabelle Li at the inaugural Australian Short Story Festival in Perth. In conversation she conveys a graceful attentiveness. She tells me that she values the Chinese artistic tradition of training and […]

Portable Curiosities By Julie Koh University of Queensland Press ISBN 978-0-7022-5404-8 Reviewed by Stacey Trick “There is something wrong with those who won’t see the laughing, and something is wrong with those who won’t see the crying. Don’t play dumb with me, China Doll.” ~ ‘Sight’ in Portable Curiosities. The short story form, historically, has […]

The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike Affirm Press ISBN: 9781925344479 Reviewed by JOCELYN HUNGERFORD What we talk about when we talk about grief: The Long Run: A Personal and Cultural History of Women and Running  It begins with a huge loss. When Catriona Menzies-Pike was just twenty, she came home from a bushwalk to find […]

The Herring Lass by Michelle Cahill Arc Publications ISBN 978-1910345-76-4 Reviewed by NADIA NIAZ   In a 2011 interview with the Goethe Institut Australia, Michelle Cahill spoke of how her work explores an ‘imaginary habitation in many places’. The Herring Lass is the latest phase of this exploration, demonstrating Cahill’s ability to move and connect […]

The Historian’s Daughter By Rashida Murphy ISBN: 9781742588940 UWA Publishing Reviewed by VIVIENNE GLANCE Set in India, Iran and Australia, and spanning several decades, The Historian’s Daughter tackles personal and political trauma through the eyes of Hannah, a young Anglo-Indian girl. Hannah, her sister, Gloria, and their two brothers, love their gentle, caring mother, Farah. […]

Derrida’s Breakfast By David Brooks Brandl & Schlesinger ISBN 978-1-921556-99-9 Reviewed by JONATHAN DUNK This slender but wide-ranging collection of essays approaches the question of the animal from a number of complimentary and dialectic angles. Conceived through different paradigms and contexts a figure of the animal emerges in philosophy and poetics functioning as a liminal […]

Getting By Not Fitting In by Les Wicks  Island Reviewed by CAROL JENKINS         Getting By Not Fitting In is Les Wick’s thirteenth book. As someone who has arrived at poetry latish, thirteen seems a lot of books. What would one have left to say? Plenty it seems. I came to Getting […]

Have Been And Are by Brook Emery ISBN: 978 0 994 5275 3 0 GloriaSMH Press   Thinking Poetry: Brook Emery’s have been and are (Gloria SMH, 2016) [From the launch speech given at the Friend in Hand Hotel in Glebe on Saturday 10 September, 2016.] Welcome everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, […]

Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey Hamish Hamilton ISBN 9781926428581 Reviewed by JO LANGDON Ceridwen Dovey’s award-winning Only the Animals is comprised of astonishing interventions and a multiplicity of voices that powerfully re-create and re-focalise narratives of the past. Each of the ten stories is typically recalled, posthumously, by the ‘soul’ of an animal affected—and […]

One Hundred Letters Home by Adam Aitken Vagabond Press ISBN  978-1-922181-04-6 Reviewed by REBECCA ALLEN “Doctor, Where is the healing in writing? Is it simply re-telling the past, or are we re-making it? Is it a story that becomes a promise – a redeeming moment?” In his memoir A Hundred Letters Home, Adam Aitken looks back […]