Reviews/Essays

Racism: Stories on fear, hate and bigotry Edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer Sweatshop Literacy Movement Reviewed by ADELE ARIA   I was eager yet simultaneously exhausted to begin reading Racism: Stories on fear, hate & bigotry. This is not a criticism but rather acknowledges my visceral familiarity with the phenomenon. I […]

One Hundred Days Alice Pung Black Inc Reviewed by FERNANDA DAHLSTROM   Alice Pung’s fifth book and second novel, One Hundred Days (Black Inc, 2021), deals with the difficult relationship between sixteen-year-old Karuna and her manipulative and overbearing (but also loving and hardworking) Chinese Filapino mother. Karuna’s father, who is Anglo Australian, has left the […]

Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery UQP ISBN 9780702262760 Reviewed by BEC KAVANAGH Laura Elvery’s second collection of short stories, Ordinary Matter, takes its inspiration from the mere twenty times women have won the Nobel Prize for science. And yet it isn’t science that connects the pieces in this collection, but the ‘softer’ stuff: the women […]

Whisper Songs by Tony Birch UQP ISBN 9780702263279 Reviewed by BEN HESSION Tony Birch is a Naarm (Melbourne) based writer, who is probably better known for his prose, including his short story collections and novels, of which, The White Girl, won the Indigenous Writers’ Prize of the 2020 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. He […]

The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems Stephen Edgar Black Pepper ISBN 9780648038740 Reviewed by KEVIN HART   Poetry always involves a delicate negotiation between craft and art. Craft can easily be misunderstood as a set of skills completely external to what is being written. Yet a poet shows craft by moving confidently within the work […]

Take Care by Eunice Andrada Giramondo ISBN 9781925818796 Reviewed by DONNALYN XU How do we give shape to what resists language? How do words move against the body, in dialogue with its silence, its noise? These tangled questions emerge from my reading of Eunice Andrada’s second collection of poems, TAKE CARE, and the writing of […]

While I am drawing breath By Rose Ausländer, translated by Anthony Vivis and Jean Boase-Beier ISBN 978 1906570 30 9 Arc Publications Reviewed by LESLEY LEBKOWICZ Black milk: the poetry of Rose Ausländer Many poetry readers, asked about the poetry of the Holocaust, will think of Paul Celan’s Todesfuge and its powerful opening image: Black […]

The Everlasting Sunday by Robert Lukins ISBN UQP Reviewed by AMY WALTERS Robert Lukins’ debut novel follows seventeen-year-old Radford as he commences at Goodwin Manor, “a place for boys who had been found by trouble” (19). The Manor is a dilapidated institution of reform in the Shropshire countryside, which the Queensland-raised Lukins has said was […]

Our Shadows by Gail Jones ISBN 9781922330284 Text Publishing  Reviewed by KATELIN FARNSWORTH  Our Shadows by Gail Jones is a family saga that examines the intimate lives of three generations living in Kalgoorlie. The story starts with Paddy Hannan, an Irish-born prospector who discovered gold back in 1893. Paddy’s history is woven in and out […]

Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt by Elena Gomez Puncher and Wattmann ISBN 9781925780741 Reviewed by Dženana Vucic To read Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (2020), Elena Gomez’s second full-length poetry collection, is to be propelled headlong through the dizzy intersect of postmodernity and Marxist-feminist critique, to be flooded with possibilities for distraction, and […]

British India, White Australia by Kama Maclean ISBN 9781742236216 New South Books Reviewed by JOSHUA BIRD Perhaps one of the most under-appreciated elements of systems of racial discrimination is their sheer banality.  Whether it be the efficient genocidal bureaucracy of the Nazi holocaust or the complex racist laws and policies that held together the system […]

The Mother Wound Amani Haydar Panmacmillan ISBN 9781760982454 Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER Strong Women Amani Haydar’s powerful memoir takes its title from Dr Oscar Serrallach’s term ‘the mother wound’, which describes how ‘the relationship between mothers and daughters is affected by unhealed traumatic experiences passed down matriarchal lines’ (333). In her family, Haydar says, the […]

Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau Hachette ISBN 9780733646270 Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG Consumption and corporeality in late capitalism A reading of Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby After the deliquescent dream of Pink Mountain on Locust Island, Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is a wake-up call from a silent number in the small hours of […]

Monsters by Alison Croggon Scribe ISBN 9781925713398 Reviewed by GAYATRI NAIR   I initially didn’t want to review this book. It is written by a white woman, and as a person of colour (POC) who wants to elevate diverse writing, I thought it was important to only review other diverse writers. However, after discussion with […]

Against Certain Capture by Miriam Wei Wei Lo Apothecary Archive ISBN: 978-0-6488079-7-1   Reviewed by JACKSON The interestingly eccentric Apothecary Archive recently re-issued Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s collection, Against Certain Capture, which won the 2004 WA Premier’s Book Award for Poetry. Like many Australian citizens, Lo has a complicated background. She was born in Canada […]

I Said The Sea Was Folded by Erik Jensen Black Inc ISBN: 9781760642914 Reviewed by JOSIE/JOCELYN DEANE     The first poem, chronologically, in I said the sea was folded begins  I don’t know if you read poetry I don’t know if I write it. (p.55) Jane Hirshfield tells the speaker of the book, in another, […]

Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson ISBN 9780733643743 Hachette 2020 Reviewed by PIP NEWLING To read Song of the Crocodile is to immerse yourself in an unfolding relationship to place. You may not recognise it immediately but the profound connection to place shared by Simpson through this story is a slow build to love, […]

The Other Half of You Michael Mohammed Ahmad ISBN 9780733639036 Hachette Reviewed by MICHELLE HAMADACHE The Other Half of You isn’t written just for all the readers out there who get what it’s like to be the child of migrant parents. It’s not just written for those who know already what it’s like to deal […]

Second City: Essays From Western Sydney Edited by Luke Carman & Catriona Menzies-Pike Sydney Review of Books ISBN 978-0-6480621-3-4 Reviewed by CHER TAN     In ‘Second City’, the titular essay by Eda Gunaydin in Second City, an anthology of essays collected and published by the Sydney Review of Books, Gunaydin begins: ‘I spent the […]

No Document by Anwen Crawford ISBN 9781925818611 Giramondo Reviewed by NEHA KALE Anwen Crawford’s No Document, a memorial to the casualties of late capitalism, occupies the space between elegy and witness, language and art.  In February 1991, a strange billboard materialised on New York’s Van Dam Street, perplexing commuters who happened to be travelling under […]