Reviews/Essays

Not Telling by Alison J. Barton Puncher & Wattmann Reviewed by ANTHEA YANG   In Not Telling, Alison J. Barton paints an expansive portrait of memory, family, culture and the personal and collective grief and trauma caused by the colonisation of Australia. Weaving through the collection’s three main sections, and binding the themes together, is […]

Framed By Nishi Pulugurtha PenPrints ISBN 9788198156464 Reviewed by SAFA SHARFUDEEN     There are times when we fall into a reading slump where long novels feel too daunting, and we struggle to find the energy or the time to engage with a book. Framed, a collection of eleven short stories by Nishi Pulugurtha, is […]

Dr Pip Newling reads and writes on unceded Dharawahl Country. She has published memoir and essays, including Knockabout Girl (Harper Collins, 2007).         I watched the May flooding of the Manning River from a distance, with childhood memories of rain and water and disappearing islands, of the power of a deluge running beneath […]

Monsoon Seems Promising This Year By Rudra Pati Tristoop Translated from Bengali by Matralina Pati Reviewed by NITHYA ELIZABETH SAM   Rudra Pati’s Monsoon Seems Promising This Year is a heartfelt journey through the life of marginalized farmers in the village of Manbhum. The drought-prone Purulia region of Manbhum lies to the extreme west of […]

Heartsease Kate Kruimink Picador ISBN  9781761561955 Reviewed by NINA CULLEY Some novels announce their ghosts; others let them quietly inhabit the edges. In Heartsease, the second novel by award winner Alice Kruimink, ghosts live on: in muscle memory, in unfinished conversations, in the residue of grief. Where Kruimink’s debut, A Treacherous Country, explored the weight […]

Guido Melo is an Afro-Brazilian-Latinx Post Graduate Research Candidate at Victoria University in Naarm (Melbourne). He is also the Vice President of the African Studies Group at Melbourne University. He holds positions as a board member of the Incubate Foundation. He is a Multilingual author, and his words can be found in Australia in Meanjin Quarterly, Kill Your Darlings, […]

If there is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon Gazebo ISBN: 978-0-6456337-5-7 Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR-JOHNSON   In the opening poem of If there is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon writes, I want to write structure will work: a sonnet, a sestina, a couplet—the baby sh— its In these five lines […]

The Pulling by Adele Dumont Scribe ISBN 9781922585912 Reviewed by AZ COSGROVE   Ostensibly, Adele Dumont’s collection The Pulling (2024) is about the author’s experience of trichotillomania, or compulsive hair pulling. Importantly, I myself have never experienced trichotillomania, and I refuse to participate in the historical silencing that has too often been directed towards those […]

Vessel by Dani Netherclift Upswell Publishing Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT       On its opening page, with very little in the way of preamble, Vessel establishes its central incident: 1993. A Saturday. Thirty-eight degrees Celsius. I don’t know what time it is when I witness my father and brother drown, minutes – perhaps only […]

Empathy By Hoa Pham MIT Press ISBN 9781913380618 Reviewed by JUDITHH HUANG In Empathy, a speculative fiction novel that blends some of the most potent concerns in our post-pandemic world, Hoa Pham has created a dystopia in which unethical medical experiments involving human cloning and mass pharmaceutical control are not just practiced but accepted as […]

Me, Her, Us by Yen Rong Wong UQP ISBN 9780702266201 Reviewed by ZHI YI SAW Me, Her, Us, by award-winning non-fiction writer and art critic Yen-Rong Wong, is her debut collection of memoir-essays that centres around her investigation and views of various relationships: Her own with sex (Me), her relationship with her mother (Her), and […]

The World With Its Mouth Open Zahid Rafiq Tin House ISBN 9781959030850 Reviewed by AASHNA JAMAL The men are restrained and evasive, the women are waiting for something that never arrives. A sense of resignation pervades the eleven short stories in Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story book collection, The World With Its Mouth Open published […]

Politica                                                                                                by Yumna Kassab Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761152009 […]

Stamatia X by Effie Carr ISBN: 9780648170716 Primer Fiction Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI   Stamatia X is a novel fuelled by Greek philosophy, grammar, poetry and history to tell the riveting story of a Greek-Australian, migrant family’s return to their “homeland”. Nostalgia has no place to dwell in this book as the family of five […]

A Brief History of Australian Terror By Bobuq Sayed ISBN     Common Room Editions Reviewed by DAVID COADY Bobuq Sayed, a non-binary member of the Afghan diaspora, has put together a brief chapbook of three essays on Islamophobia in Australia. This is a timely and insightful contribution to public debate. The subject, however, cries […]

Because I am Not Myself, You See Ariane Beeston Black Inc ISBN 978-1760644505 Reviewed by A.D. JOHN I tumbled headfirst into Ariane Beeston’s beautiful, poignant, and heart-wrenching memoir, Because I’m Not Myself You See. It affected me like no book has in recent memory. I devoured it over a weekend, engrossed in a story that […]

Thanks for Having Me By Emma Darragh Allen & Unwin Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER I cannot say I’ve ever had the eureka moment in which I found myself lost in a novel that felt like it had been written for me or had been written about the world I knew personally. Perhaps my interest in […]

Refugia By Elfie Shiosaki Magabala Books ISBN 9781922777133 Reviewed by CHLOE ROBINSON Having previously reviewed Shiosaki’s writing, I picked up Refugia with high expectations, anticipating powerful language and incredible storytelling. But this went well beyond my expectations, achieving its 5-star status, not even halfway through the opening section. I read through the collection twice without […]

Flow Luoyang Chen Red River Press Available at Amplify Books Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON Flow is both a verb and a noun, an elusive character and a slippery act of movement, in Luoyang Chen’s beguiling debut collection, Flow (Red River). While Chen tells us in his biography that he is interested in the lyric “I” […]