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Reviews/Essays


Angela Costi reviews Witness by Louise Milligan

September 26, 2024
Witness by Louise Milligan ISBN: 9780733644634 Hachette Reviewed by Angela Costi The Trauma of Trial for Survivors of Crime Traditionally, an investigative journalist provides an in-depth analysis of a matter or issue of public concern without having experienced the problem being uncovered. This is not the case in Witness. In Louise Milligan’s book there is […]

Deborah Pike reviews The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp

August 24, 2024
The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsopp Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761151668 Reviewed by DEBORAH PIKE     Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel, The Great Undoing, has a great cover that undoes history with a red crayon. Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916) is struck out and bold typeface declares an angry and urgent call for […]

Katie Hansord reviews The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat by Sara M Saleh

August 21, 2024
The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat Sara M Saleh UQP 2023 Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD How to begin to do justice to reviewing a book of poetry this important, this powerful, and in this moment? If I were to recommend one book to people this year, it would be this. And it has been. […]

Isabel Howard reviews Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn

August 14, 2024
Dirt Poor Islanders by Winnie Dunn Hachette ISBN 978-0733649264 Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD Intercultural struggle is the main question at hand in Winnie Dunn’s Dirt Poor Islanders: how do you define yourself between two different cultures that shape every aspect of your life? Dunn’s novel is written from the perspective of Meadow, a young, mixed-race […]

Gan Amin reviews Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

August 14, 2024
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck translated by Michael Hofmann ISBN 9781783786121 Granta Reviewed by GAN AINM   It’s hard to avoid the idea of allegory when approaching Jenny Erpenbeck’s International Booker Prize-winner, Kairos. Right from the cover, we are told by Neel Mukherjee that ‘Erpenbeck has written an allegory for her nation, a country that has […]

James Gobbey reviews Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

July 16, 2024
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar Pan Macmillan ISBN: 9781035026074 Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY   If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among those that survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe […]

Misbah Wolf reviews Moon Wrasse by Willo Drummond

July 12, 2024
Moon Wrasse by Willo Drummond Puncher and Wattmann ISBN 1922571679 Review by MISBAH WOLF When I first picked up Willo Drummond’s debut poetry collection, Moon Wrasse, I was torn between a deep panic of knowing I wanted to become mixed up in the muck, blood, and bloom of the work and wanting to also turn away […]

Javaria Farooqui reviews The Djinn Hunters by Nadia Niaz

June 26, 2024
The Djinn Hunters By Nadia Niaz Hunter Publishers ISBN: 978-0-6453366-9-6 Reviewed by JAVARIA FAROOQUI  The Djinn Hunters is a literary fusion of colours, words, shapes, and heritage, which has been carefully crafted in very interesting and distinct poetic styles. Nadia Niaz plays with the strands of her memories of Lahore to build evocative narratives in […]

Violence, Pain and Blistering Power: Women in Lauren Groff’s Matrix by Az Cosgrove

May 5, 2024
Az is a 26-year-old trans wheelchair user with an acquired brain injury. His works of both fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such publications as Voiceworks, Archer, Overland, Mascara Review, ABC News, and the 2023 anthology of the Australian Short Story Festival. He is currently completing a Master of Literature and also graduated with distinction […]

Holly Friedlander Liddicoat reviews meditations with passing water by Jake Goetz

May 4, 2024
meditations with passing water Jake Goetz Rabbit Poetry Reviewed by HOLLY FRIEDLANDER LIDDICOAT It’s a sophisticated piece of work that imparts its subject matter through its form. This is what I distinctly remember from first reading Jake Goetz’s ‘meditations with passing water’, in one sitting, in 2018, and what still rings true on re-reading five […]

Luoyang Chen reviews The Open by Lucy Van

May 3, 2024
The Open by Lucy Van ISBN: 9780648917601 Cordite Books Reviewed by LUOYANG CHEN Perth is getting colder and I am getting cold. I am on my way to get some jumpers from Target. Writing this review in my head while walking to the bus stop, I am thinking: This is great. I want to test […]

Liz Sutherland reviews Breath by Carly-Jay Metcalfe

April 30, 2024
Breath by Carly-Jay Metcalfe ISBN 9780702268359 UQP Reviewed by LIZ SUTHERLAND Breathing was one of the few things in life I took for granted. Until I was 20, out with pneumonia for four months, three fractured ribs from excessive coughing. Then again at 32, post-COVID coughing for three months, two fractured ribs that time. Sickness […]

Jennifer Compton reviews Leaf by Anne Elvey

April 28, 2024
Leaf By Anne Elvey Liquid Amber Press ISBN 9780645044966 Reviewed by JENNIFER COMPTON   Anne Elvey was recently shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award for one of her elegant, prayerful compositions, that hardly seem to be composed of words as we know them, and yet I suppose they must be. They lift up […]

Pip Newling reviews Women and Children by Tony Birch

April 25, 2024
Women & Children By Tony Birch UQP ISBN: 9780702266270 Reviewed by PIP NEWLING   Tony Birch holds a rare place in Australian literature – a male writer focused on telling domestic and working class stories. His pages shimmer with the dirt of hard work, difficult choices, and  everyday of life. The joys in reading his […]

Samuel Cox reviews Murnane by Emmett Stinson

March 30, 2024
Murnane by Emmett Stinson Melbourne University Publishing ISBN: 9780522879469 Reviewed by SAMUEL COX   Emmett Stinson’s Murnane offers a critical and enlightening assessment of the Gerald Murnane’s four late fictions, and through these incredibly self-reflexive works, a reading of the eponymous author’s entire oeuvre. Stinson’s superb introduction gives way to chapter- length considerations of Barley […]

Naomi Milthorpe reviews H.D. Hilda Doolittle by Lara Vetter

March 29, 2024
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) by Lara Vetter Reaktion Books ISBN:9781789147599 Reviewed by NAOMI MILTHORPE   It may say more about my own tastes than about the culture more broadly, but most of my reading in the past months has been about misunderstood and multifaceted women. Lara Vetter’s slim critical life of the modernist poet H.D. has […]

Holden Walker reviews But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

March 27, 2024
But The Girl Jessica Yu Penguin ISBN: 9781761046148 Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s novel But The Girl (2023) is the story of protagonist and narrator “Girl”, as she embarks on a study abroad experience in the UK while immersing herself in British culture, contemplating her thesis, attempting to write her novel, and […]

Caroline van de Pol reviews Slipstream by Catherine Cole

March 15, 2024
Slipstream By Catherine Cole Valley Press ISBN: 9781915606341 Reviewed by CAROLINE VAN DE POL As an admirer of Catherine Cole’s earlier novels, short story collections and memoir such as Sleep, Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark and The Poet Who Forgot, I awaited the publication of her new book, Slipstream: On Memory and Migration, with […]

Katie Hansord reviews slack tide by Sarah Day

March 15, 2024
slack tide by Sarah Day Pitt St Poetry ISBN 978-1-922080-04-2. Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD “Rules are what people think, They aren’t a law of nature”.  (House Like a Folk Tale, 42) Deeply thoughtful and brilliant, Sarah Day’s most recent collection, slack tide (Pitt Street Poetry, 2022), deftly invokes the wider world of natural imagery and […]

Lisa Collyer reviews Carapace by Misbah Wolf

February 27, 2024
Carapace by Misbah Wolf ISBN 978-1-925735-41-3 Vagabond Reviewed by LISA COLLYER     You can imagine tracing the spiral on the white snail shell on the front cover of Misbah Wolf’s second poetry collection, Carapace to find yourself centred in a temporary house. Wolf’s scintillating and edgy collection of prose poems form individual houses with […]