Adam Raffel reviews The Lost Culavamsa by Ernest MacIntyre
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 called […]
Ben Hession reviews These Wild Houses by Omar Sakr
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 […]
Martin Edmond reviews Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young
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 […]
Joseph Cummins reviews Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria by Brian Castro
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 […]
Caroline van de Pol reviews Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark by Catherine Cole
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 […]
Vivienne Glance reviews The Circle and the Equator by Kyra Giorgi
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 […]
Annelise Roberts reviews Sentences from the Archive by Jen Webb
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 […]
Dominique Hecq reviews A Personal History of Vision by Luke Fischer
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 […]
Brianna Bullen reviews False Nostalgia by Aden Rolfe
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 […]
Robert Wood reviews Knocks by Emily Stewart
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 […]
Rose Hunter reviews Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón translated by Mario Licón Cabrera
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 […]
Zachary Ward reviews Preparations for Departure by Nathanael O’Reilly
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 […]
Tony Messenger reviews Constitution by Amelia Dale
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 […]
Hayley Scrivenor reviews Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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 […]
Joshua Pomare reviews A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan
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 […]
Alice Allan reviews Writing to the Wire edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen
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 reviewed by David Gilbey
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’ […]
Hayley Scrivenor reviews We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
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 […]
Robert Wood reviews Annihilation of Caste by Ambedkar, introduced by Arundhati Roi
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 […]