Reviews/Essays

Body Shell Girl by Rose Hunter Spinifex Press ISBN 9781925950502 Reviewed by JENNY HEDLEY I first encountered author Rose Hunter late in 2020 when I wrote about the decade I sold lingerie in strip clubs, hinting at but not claiming my own experience on the pole. Rose called me out on social media, furious at […]

My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women Ed Catherine Boyle MacLehose Press Quercus London Hachette Australia ISBN: 9781529422214 Reviewed by ZARLASHT SARWARI My Pen is the Wing of a Bird, draws us into the lives of fictional characters in Afghanistan in an anthology of twenty three unrelated but deeply […]

Homesickness by Janine Mikosza Ultimo Press ISBN 9781761150234 Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM   Homesickness is a memoir that strives, as Emily Dickenson urged, to tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Memoirs are reconstructions that seek to capture the voice and perspective of one or more of the writer’s younger selves. Their truth claims […]

Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle Giramondo  ISBN 9781925818772 Reviewed by JOSHUA KLARICA   A technique commonly employed by poets is the announcing of the setting or theme of the piece in its title. Consider T. S Eliot’s poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, whose title functions as a covert, preliminary line that […]

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss Simon and Schuster      Reviewed by BRENDA SAUNDERS     In the ‘Prologue’, to her novel, Heiss introduces us to Aboriginal tribal life at the onset of colonial expnsion in southern NSW. This is Gundagai in 1838. She provides the historical setting for the action and events to follow. […]

Daisy and Woolf by Michelle Cahill Hachette ISBN: 9780733645211 Launched by SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM I felt some trepidation when I heard that Michelle Cahill had written a novel about the Woolfs because I’ve been researching a book about Leonard Woolf, but, inevitably, about Virginia and other Bloomsbury sorts, for more than 15 years. I, like Michelle, […]

Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks UQP ISBN 9780702263408 Victoria University of Wellington Press, NZ Reviewed by GEMMA PARKER Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction, an exploratory memoir that combines travel narrative and nature writing with meditations on ecology, community and responsibility. These meditations revolve around a series […]

Nothing to See by Pip Adam Giramondo ISBN 9781925818680 Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM   Pip Adam’s third novel, Nothing To See, deals with female identity, addiction, digitization and impending climate disaster. Penny and Greta sleep in the same room in a shared flat. They reflect on sobriety, share clothes, receive help from the Salvation Army […]

Writing Through Fences: Archipelago of Letters Southerly 79.2 Brandl & Schlesinger  Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA     It was while reading this issue of Southerly 7.2 Writing Through Fences— Archipelago of Letters that news emerged of the Australian government’s decision to allow some refugees in its care to resettle in New Zealand and for […]

The Pigeons Are Taking Over: The Kindness of Birds by Merlinda Bobis ISBN 9781925950304 Spinifex Press Reviewed by WINNIE DUNN   Ibis The beloved bin chicken is always feeding off scraps of bread whenever I walk to Fairfield station. Because it is a sin to throw away the sacredness of bread, those leftovers become a […]

Love & Virtue By Diana Reid ISBN 9781761150111 Ultimo Press Reviewed by CLAIRE QU The prim and vaguely Austenian title of Diana Reid’s debut novel offers a tongue-in-cheek self-description consistent with the book’s plentiful irony. Many labels could be applied to it: campus novel, bildungsroman, #MeToo novel, story of contemporary female friendship. Perhaps that is […]

Born Into This by Adam Thompson ISBN 9780702263118 UQP Reviewed by DAVE CLARK   As a technique pioneered and refined over the past hundred years, keyhole surgery involves a surgeon making small incisions in the skin, so tiny that at times it is hard to tell afterwards that something significant has taken place beneath the […]

Exo-Dimensions, Mixed Feelings, Storm Warning by Seraphina Newberry & Justin Randall, Declan Miller, Lauren Boyle & Alyssa Mason Stick Mob Studio Reviewed by TOM MUNRO-HARRISON           Black eyes and a scaly, reptilian maw are met with fist and boomerang upon the unmistakable dusty red, muted tones of the Central Australian landscape. […]

Everything, all at Once Ultimo Press Sydney, 2021 ISBN 9781761150173 Reviewed by H.C. GILFIND Everything, all at Once presents fiction and poetry from the ‘thirty writers under thirty’ who won the inaugural Ultimo prize in 2021. This prize asked entrants to explore the theme of ‘identity’—a pertinent choice, considering how central and contested particular identities […]

Eurydice Speaks  by Claire Gaskin ISBN: 9780648848127 ]  Hunter Publishers Reviewed by LESH KARAN I feather my empty rest with writing I gave up relationships to right it Orpheus didn’t have to make that choice (sonnet 12) When I read Eurydice Speaks, what struck me the most (among many other things) was voice, and how it […]

Anthropocene By Sudeep Sen Salt Desert Media Group Ltd. 9781913738389 Reviewed by JENNNIFER MACKENZIE     Sudeep Sen, the poet, is in his study — where he can usually be found when in Delhi, sequestered, engaged with the world. His companion is the neem tree, light refracting through the pattern of its leaves. The tree, […]

An Embroidery of Old Maps and New by Angela Costi Spinifex, 2020 Reviewed by GEORGE MOURATIDIS             In some topoi of poesy lore, it is believed that the first iteration of Homeric oral verse as a material text was woven by women on a loom – deft fingers spinning, immortalising […]

Gentle and Fierce by Vanessa Berry Giramondo ISBN 9781925818710 Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM   Gentle and Fierce is a book of essays that provides glimpses of Sydney author Vanessa Berry’s life by dissecting her encounters with non-human animals in various contexts – in the household, in captivity, in art and in the form of ornamental […]

My Friend Fox by Heidi Everett ISBN 9781761150159 Ultimo Press Reviewed by IZZY ROBERTS-ORR At night, I can hear the foxes screaming. Nothing is wrong, this is just what they do, particularly during mating season. The first time I heard it, I thought something was seriously wrong – that a small child was being chased […]

How Decent Folk Behave By Maxine Beneba Clarke Hachette ISBN 9780733647666 Reviewed by CHRISTINE SHAMISTA Building glass walls to show ‘how decent folk behave’ From the beginning to the end, front and back covers inclusive, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s newly released book, How Decent Folk Behave, is rich with carefully curated images and words that connect […]