Reviews/Essays

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]