Reviews/Essays

A Kind of Magic by Anna Spargo-Ryan Ultimo Press ISBN: 9781761150739 Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT       From its outset, A Kind of Magic establishes two distinct kinds of language. There’s Spargo-Ryan’s narration, as she recounts meeting with her new therapist: this voice is warm and confiding. The language she employs is vibrant and […]

After the Rain by Aisling Smith Hachette ISBN 9780733648793 Reviewed by ALISON STODDART After the Rain is the debut for Melbourne-based author, Aisling Smith, a previous winner of the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. The novel is an enticing exploration of diaspora and all its inherent obstacles encountered by migrants, including the internalised racism that […]

Anam by André Dao Penguin ISBN:9781761046940 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET     André Dao’s debut novel Anam is like a house with many rooms and windows, to use an image employed by its author. Its multiple locales account for the shattering, scattering, and smattering of Vietnamese people across the globe, and their resettlement in outer […]

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran ISBN 9781761151408 Ultimo Press Reviewed by MARIE-CLAIRE COLYER       Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Shankari Chandran’s third published novel, is a narrative of substance. You could be excused for expecting a light-hearted romp through an old people’s home, if you judged this book by the […]

Funny Ethnics by Shirley Le ISBN: 9781922863737 Affirm Press Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG   My greatest flaw as a critic is my inability to maintain critical distance. I actively seek out books that I expect will resonate with me: a novel about a mother who writes poetry, a collection of essays exploring the nature of […]

Harvest Lingo Lionel Fogarty Giramondo ISBN 9781925336177 Reviewed by SAMUEL COX Despite having been named the ‘poet laureate’ of Aboriginal literature by author Alexis Wright and the ‘greatest living poet in Australia’ by poet John Kinsella, Lionel Fogarty’s poetry, previously published by small independent presses, has remained both critically and popularly underappreciated. I count myself […]

I Have Decided To Remain Vertical by Gayelene Carbis ISBN: 978122571489 Puncher and Wattmann Reviewed by MARION MAY CAMPBELL I Have Decided To Remain Vertical is an exhilarating extension and intensification of some of the major themes of Carbis’s first collection Anecdotal Evidence: her never leaving Carnegie; a family strangely functional in the wake of […]

Acanthus by Claire Potter Giramondo Reviewed by LESH KARAN         Acanthus is Claire Potter’s fourth collection of poetry. Potter writes in a language that weaves mythology with nature, fantasy with reality and then wraps it all up in tulle. If I had to write a one-word review, surreal feels apt, but I […]

Freedom, Only Freedom By Behrouz Boochani (Author), Moones Mansoubi (Anthology Editor), Omid Tofighian (Anthology Editor) Bloomsbury Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM         For the years that he was in immigration detention on Manus Island, Kurdish Iranian journalist Behrooz Boochani was known as ‘the voice of Manus.’ Writing on a smartphone, Boochani documented events, conditions and […]

Childhood by Shannon Burns Text Publishing ISBN: 9781922330789 Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT   Anyone writing about their childhood must grapple with the intervening gulf of time, and with the strange slipperiness of memory. This is especially so for Shannon Burns, who today lives a stable, contented life in the higher echelons of Australia’s middle class, […]

This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham Ultimo Press ISBN 9781761150937 Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL   I go on believing in the power of literature, and also in the politics of literature. —- Adrienne Rich Sophie Cunningham messaged me on Twitter when I was working on the edits of my novel, Daisy & Woolf, then titled, […]

Sydney Spleen by Toby Fitch Giramondo ISBN 9781925818758 Reviewed by BEN HESSION         Sydney Spleen is the latest collection of poetry by Toby Fitch. Its title alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s volume of prose poems, Paris Spleen. Whilst for Baudelaire, there was a desire to import the expansiveness and consequent wider palette of […]

Open Secrets Ed. Catriona Menzies-Pike Giramondo ISBN 9780648062165 Reviewed by LAURA PETTENUZO   As both a reader and writer, I was eager to dive into Open Secrets, to immerse myself in the wisdom of those with far more literary experience. As a disabled writer still shielding from COVID-19 and knowing that many of these pieces […]

Audrey Molloy is an Irish-Australian poet based in Sydney. Her debut collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021), received the 2021 Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the 2022 Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. Ordinary Time, a collaboration with Anthony Lawrence, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2022. She has an […]

Stamiata X by Effie Carr Primer Fiction  Reviewed by ALISON HATZANTONIS   Years ago, when my first baby was a few months old, my half Greek, Australian born husband and I took Greek language lessons. In the depth of winter on cold cold nights I would leave my baby sound asleep in her Yia yia’s […]

How not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz Macmillan Reviewed by NATALIA FIGUEROA BARROSO       Over a round of yerba mate is where I’ve heard the best storytellers. In these circles of trust, tongues and tales become tangible and ideas are formed. Before the written word came to lay […]

Spirit Level by Marcelle Freiman Puncher and Wattmann, 2021 ISBN 9781922571144 Reviewed by ADAM AITKEN Marcelle Freiman’s collection poems Spirit Level, her third book, surely deserves Jill Jones’ endorsement as a book where ‘clarity of memory [sits] alongside a shimmer of location’, whose ‘presences and absences’ are to be savoured. As restless, dynamic, and ‘unsettled’ […]

Unsettled by Gay Lynch Ligature Publishers ISBN 192588323X Reviewed by MICHAEL HANNAN What does it mean to tell the stories of one’s ancestors? How do human beings endure landscapes dominated by scarcity, isolation, gruelling labour, and patriarchal cruelty? And what is the price to be paid for survival? These questions animate Gay Lynch’s Unsettled, an […]

Clean by Scott Patrick-Mitchell Upswell Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER       Western-Australian poet Scott-Patrick Mitchell has spent the best part of the last decade appearing in some of Australia’s most celebrated literary journals, headlining spoken-word poetry showcases, and contributing to acclaimed anthologies. However, in 2022, Upswell published Mitchell’s first full-length collection of poetry titled […]

mō taku tama by Vaughan Rapatahana Kilmog Press Reviewed by MARTIN EDMOND     I first encountered Vaughan Rapatahana in 2010, in the pages of brief magazine, in the days when it was being edited by Jack Ross. Rapatahana’s writing was bi-lingual ― English and te reo Māori ― typographically inventive and uncompromising in its […]