Reviews/Essays

Dry Milk By Huo Yan (trans. Duncan M. Campbell) Giramondo ISBN 978-1-925336-99-3 Reviewed by MAKS SIPOWICZ Huo Yan’s Dry Milk is a book about many things all at once. It is a meticulous character study of an unpleasant man who never quite settles in a new country. It is a philosophical parable about following the […]

Toward the End By Ali Alizadeh Giramondo ISBN 978-1-925818-22-2 Reviewed by KIRAN BHAT While it was a mainstay of early 20th century writing, the styles, tendencies, and structures of social realist literature went out of vogue fairly quickly. Perhaps it is because of the proselytising nature of such texts, or because works of only one […]

Newcastle Sonnets By Keri Glastonbury Giramondo ISBN 978-1-925336-89-4 Reviewed by ERIN MCFADYEN Keri Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets are at their most mimetic when firing off their dazzling one-liners. The collection is interested in the processes of de- and re-composition that make up, continually, the post-industrial suburbanscape of Newcastle. Taking the city as a kind of monkey-bars apparatus […]

Turbulence By Thuy On UWA Publishing ISBN 978-1-76080-119-9 Reviewed by JACKIE SMITH If you pay attention to the nation’s arts sector, you’re probably familiar with Thuy On. For many years, she has worked as a freelance writer and arts critic with The Age and The Saturday Paper and Books+Publishing as well as holding the books editor […]

Heide By π.O. Giramondo ISBN 9781925818208 Reviewed by ABIGAIL FISHER   Trying unsuccessfully to write this review in June, I ride alongside the Eastern Freeway to Bulleen. The gallery is closed but I visit the bees, the bare trees, the corrugated cows. Plaques along the path by the river gloss over the Wurundjeri history of Bolin […]

The Girls By Chloe Higgins Picador ISBN 9781760782238 Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT The title of Chloe Higgins’ debut memoir is shorthand for her two younger sisters, victims of a fatal car accident when the author is aged seventeen. Her family avoids using their individual names, explains Higgins, so that ‘they are separate from us, an abstract […]

Thorn by Todd Turner Puncher and Wattmann ISBN: 9781925780635 Reviewed by CAITLIN WILSON An Uneasy Symbiosis: A Review of Todd Turner’s Thorn  Todd Turner’s Thorn mines the relationship between the earth and the things which populate it, musing on their motives and daily moves. An uneasy symbiosis between animals and people, the natural and the […]

Benevolence by Julie Janson ISBN: 9781925936636 Magabala Books Reviewed by HAYLEY SCRIVENOR ‘I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and […]

Archival Poetics by Natalie Harkin Vagabond ISBN 9781925735215 Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE It can be tempting to imagine that colonisation is a thing of the past; that posting an infographic on Instagram on Sorry Day counts as activism; that the horrors white settlers inflicted on First Nations peoples can be considered in the past tense. […]

Where Only the Sky had Hung Before by Toby Fitch Vagabond ISBN 978-1-925735-32-1 Reviewed by Jeremy George For all the obvious reasons I have been reflecting lately on what Walter Benjamin’s observes in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ ; “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience… [however] his nesting places — the […]

Mother of Pearl by Angela Savage Transit Lounge ISBN 978-1-925760-35-4 Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG Mother of Pearl: Perspectives on exploitation When I open a book by a white writer and am confronted by the point of view of a person of colour, my body tenses as if in anticipation of a blow. Rather than reading, […]

Blueberries by Ellena Savage TEXT ISBN: 9781922268563 Reviewed by VICTORIA NUGENT Memoir, poetry, probing essay-style musings and competing inner voices exist side-by-side in Ellena Savage’s Blueberries, a bold and incisive collection of experimental non-fiction.  While Blueberries is Savage’s debut essay collection, she has been widely published, with her works appearing in literary journals, daily publications […]

A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop Text ISBN 9781925773842 Reviewed by H.C. GILDFIND   Just a blur through bushfire glow, on Alice Bishop’s A Constant Hum In the acknowledgements that append her short story collection, A Constant Hum, Alice Bishop states that her book is intended to keep ‘in mind’ the people who died in Black […]

Everything Changes: Australian Writers and China, A Transcultural Anthology Ed. Xianlin Song and Nicolas Jose UWAPublishing ISBN: 978-1-76080-112-0 Reviewed by EMILY ZONG “Many Chinese names became strange or lost in the crossing. . . . Perhaps the plum will flourish on this soil, like the white plum in our yard, and transplanted, my daughter can recover […]

The Pillars by Peter Polites Hachette ISBN 9780733640186 Reviewed by JEAN-FRANÇOIS VERNAY   In her essay on suburbia, Helen Garner discusses the politics of location in Australia and how real estate, or an acute political sense of place, seems to situate people on the social scale. Back in the 1990s, Helen Garner lived in Sydney’s […]

We’ll Stand in that Place and Other Stories   Edited by Michelle Cahill Margaret River Press Reviewed by AMY VAN DER LINDEN   ‘In the short story form, a writer commits to a vivid and entire world; a world in which voice and dialogue matter exceedingly, sometimes tangentially, and every sentence is measured to carry […]

Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing by Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew Routledge ISBN: 978 1 138 09259 4 Reviewed by SOPHIE BAGGOTT First of all, I owe readers a disclosure: if this book is an interrogation of power asymmetry and its potential to foster violence, then it’s disquieting that […]

On Shirley Hazzard Black Inc, 2019 ISBN 9781760640194 Reviewed by JEAN-FRANCOIS VERNAY “By right of admiration” Following the publication of Nam Le’s On David Malouf, Black Inc has now released the sixth volume in the Writers on Writers Series. Fiction writer Michelle De Kretser, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, has been put to […]

Beautiful Revolutionary by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Scribe ISBN: 978192573039 Reviewed by ELLA JEFFERY   Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s first novel, Beautiful Revolutionary, takes the reader into the lives of several members of the Peoples Temple, the socialist church created by the charismatic, manipulative and controlling preacher Jim Jones in California in the 1960s. The novel follows […]

Ashbery Mode Ed. by Michael Farrell Tinfish Press ISBN 9781732928602 Reviewed by GARETH MORGAN   While the term ‘mode’ suggests something computerish, or mode as in moda, fashion, the poems in Ashbery Mode are less ‘coding’ or ‘trying on’ of style, more an absorption inside of a massive body of work. Ashbery’s poetry is a […]