Reviews/Essays

Know Your Country by Kerri Shying ISBN: 9781925780765 Puncher and Wattman Reviewed by DANNI NETHERCLIFT Mark Berryman’s original artwork on the cover of Kerri Shying’s Know Your Country is a study in aqueous blues and greens, reminiscent of underwater scenes, long neglected sites of lostness and loss, the kind of world inhabited by forgotten shipwrecks. […]

Where the Fruit Falls by Karen Wyld UWAP ISBN: 978-1-76080-157-1 Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER   Karen Wyld’s Where the Fruit Falls is an important new novel in the field of Australian Aboriginal literature and a tribute to the work of UWAP under the stewardship of its out-going director Terri-Ann White who, as Wyld says in […]

Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen   ISBN 978070226318   UQP Reviewed by TIMMAH BALL Dropbear: writing as an act of defiance  when my body is mine i will tell them with belly&bones               do not touch this prefix               or let you hands burn black               with your unsettlement               there are no metaphors here -decolonial poetics (avant gubba) Multiple […]

Australianama: the South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun UQP Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA Samia Khatun takes a tack pioneered by Peter Drew, an Australian who made posters labelled with the word “Aussie” and featuring a migrant cameleer. He wrote about the development of his art practice in ‘Poster Boy: A Memoir of […]

Motherhood by Sheila Heti ISBN: 9780099592846 Penguin Reviewed by DIVYA VENKATARAMAN When I arrive at a decision about motherhood – to be, or not to be? – I almost certainly won’t get there by employing the kind of esoteric abstraction Sheila Heti’s unnamed narrator does. That being said, Heti’s discursive, conversational monologue of a novel is […]

Navigable Ink by Jennifer McKenzie ISBN:P 978-1-925760-52-1 Transit Lounge Reviewed by ANNEE LAWRENCE   Jennifer Mackenzie’s collection of poems Navigable Ink takes inspiration from, reveres and amplifies the life events, writings, reflections and concerns with history of the Indonesian author and activist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006). The idea of writing the poems emerged after Mackenzie […]

Echoes by Shu-Ling Chua SomeKind Press Reviewed by Dženana Vucic   I raced through Echoes the first time I read it. Raced through it the second time, too. At under 85 pages it’s a short book—a chapbook, almost—and easily inhaled over an idle afternoon. If you can resist, the three essays can be spread over […]

Peace Crimes: Pine Gap, National Security and Dissent by Kieran Finnane UQP ISBN 978 0 7022 6044 5 Reviewed by TAMARA LAZAROFF   I have to admit I jumped at the chance to review Peace Crimes, partly because I know two of the six so-called ‘criminals’ – the Peace Pilgrims – who are Finnane’s subjects. […]

The House of Youssef by Yumna Kassab Giramondo ISBN: 9781925818192 Reviewed by SHEILA NGOC PHAM   “The two chairs: tea, coffee, fruit. They discuss the house, banking, they keep away from the future. The birds play in their bath. She thinks of karma and pain and suffering. There is a world beyond this yard and she […]

A History of What I’ll Become  By Jill Jones  ISBN: 978-1-76080-121-2 University of Western Australia Press Reviewed by ERIN McFAYDEN   Jill Jones’s A History of What I’ll Become practices profusion: formally, across its 85 interlocking poems and reams of reference, and affectively, in its oscillation between deep delight and an equally profound sense of […]

Change Machine by Jaya Savige UQP Press ISBN 9780702262869 Reviewed by J. C. MASTERS This is what happens when you binge on beauty: eventually the orgy kills you[.] (‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’, 19) If you’ve ever sat in on a literature class, at some point you may have heard someone mention Charles Baudelaire’s description of […]

A Kinder Sea by Felicity Plunkett UQP ISBN 9780702262708 Reviewed by J.C. Masters Growing up on the coast, I felt like the sea and I were easy and old friends. The water framed my first two decades of life; smeared in sun cream and rash vests, my parents would take me to the beach on […]

Throat By Ellen Van Neerven UQP Reviewed by DANIEL SLEIMAN     In reading poetry, we look for those rare moments where a creative sequence of words thoroughly subjects our thinking, our feeling and our knowledge to a momentary realisation of reinterpreted or interrupted truth. There are many of those moments one finds while reading […]

The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha ISBN Harvill Secker Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE   Reading Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering during a global pandemic and in a time where all but essential travel within state borders is forbidden is a strange experience. In the author’s acknowledgement included at the end of this book, Paramaditha writes that the […]

Case Notes By David Stavanger UWA Publishing ISBN 978-1-76080-119-9 Reviewed by DAVE CLARK I recently attended a training course that looked into depression. As I sat, sipping on an Earl Grey tea, the presenter went on an acronym spree, throwing them around like a farmer with an excess of seeds. I was beginning to feel […]

Kokomo by Victoria Hannan Hachette ISBN 9780733643323 Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG   In lockdown, distance regained some of its former authority. For six of the last twelve months, many Melburnians have lived, worked and didn’t work within a five kilometre radius of their home. My parents live 22 kilometres away, and though there isn’t a […]

Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe UQP Reviewed by KATELIN FARNSWORTH ‘Meriem hopes that her wounds too will mend, that her jagged edges and disfigured depths will fade. Disappear. That one day she is restored enough to abide a loved one’s touch upon her skin’ I like stories that are raw, unflinching in their […]

Entries by Prithvi Varatharajan ISBN: 9780648511632 Cordite Reviewed by MIRIAM WEI WEI LO Reading Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries, is like tuning in to an erudite conversation. At first my brain struggles. Then, like a middle-aged woman on the tenth day of exercise boot-camp, I suddenly find myself keeping up. Twelve poems in, I’m not only keeping […]

The Tiniest House of Time By Sreedhevi Iyer Wild Dingo Press 9781925893069 Reviewed by JENNNIFER MACKENZIE “How will you remember her?” “As someone who knew so much, and kept it well hidden.” (316) Sreedhevi Iyer’s The Tiniest House of Time is a book for our time, examining as it does the profound silences that a […]

A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina By Paul Kane White Crane Books ISBN 978-0-648337-11-9 Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY “Paul Kane is a poet, critic, scholar and librettist” who splits his time between Australia (principally rural Victoria) and the USA and is well-known in the former as a driving force in the Mildura Writers Festival, along […]