Reviews/Essays

Milk Teeth by Rae White ISBN: 978 0 7022 6016 2 UQP  Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE Rae White might be categorised as emerging, but their success as a poet is established. Winner of the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, placing second in the Judith Wright Poetry […]

My Van Gogh By Chandani Lokugé Arden (2019) ISBN 978-1-925984-17-0 by Paul Giffard-Foret Chandani Lokugé’s fifth novel My Van Gogh takes the reader on a romantic and artistic journey across borders, from the rural farming lands of Victoria in Australia, where part of her characters’ family on their father’s side is from, to some of […]

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 Being a Working-Class Writer How does a working-class girl from the council estate become a poet? And what’s class got to with it anyway? What does it mean to be a working-class writer? Can I still be a working-class writer now that I work in a university? What do working-class writers write about? Answering […]

Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas Allen and Unwin ISBN:9781760875091 Reviewed by JACK STANTON Damascus seems to be a departure for Christos Tsiolkas. The previous novels of the celebrated Melbourne writer mostly inhabit contemporary Australia and Europe. But that being said, Damascus, as the title suggests, travels back to the life of Saul of Tarsus, or Paul […]

Flood Damages by Eunice Andrada Giramondo ISBN: 978-1-925336-66-5 Reviewed by DARLENE SOBERANO In her debut poetry collection, Flood Damages, Eunice Andrada never explicitly mentions the words, ‘New South Wales.’ Nor does she name ‘Australia’ in any of the 37 poems. She opts for restraint, often using the word ‘here’ as a substitute for the name […]

Sweatshop Women: Volume One Ed. Winnie Dunn Sweatshop Reviewed by MAGAN MAGAN       What does it look like to tell your own story about love, faith, home and history? It looks like a collection of prose and poetry titled Sweatshop Women written by women from Indigenous, migrant and refugee backgrounds. Writers who courageously […]

Sleep By Catherine Cole ISBN:978 1 76080 092 5 UWA Publishing Reviewed by Julie Keys     ‘Will You forgive me?’ Monica asks her daughter, Ruth, in the opening paragraph of Sleep. ‘Forgive?’ I thought. What is there to forgive?’ (1) As a child Ruth does not understand the angst behind her mother’s question and […]

Yellow City by Ellena Savage The Atlas Review Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT     Yellow City charts Ellena Savage’s travels in Lisbon, a city she returned to having experienced an assault there eleven years prior. Framed as a set of journal entries spanning three weeks in 2017, the chapbook records the author’s attempts to locate […]

Room for a Stranger by Melanie Cheng TEXT publishing ISBN: 9781925773545 Reviewed by VICTORIA NUGENT Two strangers from completely different backgrounds with seemingly little in common thrown together, it’s a common enough set up for a novel. But in Room for A Stranger, Melanie Cheng uses that premise exceptionally well to create an undeniably pleasurable […]

Infinite Threads Ed.  Alison Whittaker Xoum ISBN: 9781925589795 Reviewed by HARRY GODDARD Alison Whittaker begins her foreword to the 2019 UTS Writers’ Anthology with an image of infinite threads converging ‘through some tiny waterways and floodplains and mudflats’ (p.vii). She traces these pathways through the soles of our shoes as they melt onto a road, up through […]

Crow College: New and Selected Poems Emma Lew Giramondo ISBN: 978-1-925818-05-5 Reviewed by ROSE LUCAS         This year, Giramondo has released a new selection of the poems of Emma Lew. An notable poet in the Australian poetry scene for over twenty years now, this edition includes poems from Lew’s two previous collections, […]

Sun Music by Judith Beveridge Giramondo ISBN 978-1-925336-88-7 Reviewed by CAITLIN WILSON “I often think about The long process that loves The sound we make. It swings us until We’ve got it by heart: The music we are”  “Girl Swinging” Judith Beveridge tells us what she is. In the introduction to her collection Sun Music: New […]

On David Malouf Nam Le Black Inc, 2019 ISBN 9781760640392 Reviewed by JEAN-FRANCOIS VERNAY     “Identity can be experienced in two ways. Either as a confident being-in the-world or as anxiety about our-place-in-the-world; as something we live for ourselves, or as something that demands for its confirmation the approval of others.”              David Malouf (1) […]

Traverse by Tineke Van der Eecken Wild Weeds Press ISBN 978-0648320678 Reviewed by SAMANTHA TRAYHURN       Traverse by Tineke Van Der Eecken is a novel about the micro-offences that culminate in the end of a marriage. Physical distance and emotional distance. Wandering minds, snide remarks, broken trust. Part travel memoir, part personal reflection, […]

Sergius Seeks Bacchus by Norman Erikson Pasaribu translated by Tiffany Tsao Giramondo ISBN:9781925818109 Reviewed by DMETRI KAKMI Born to a Muslim father and a Protestant mother, Norman Erikson Pasaribu was raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, but his roots lie in the ethnic Christian Batak community of Sumatra. Though he writes in Indonesian, Pasaribu’s poetry collection Sergius […]

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell Black Inc. ISBN: 9781760640958 Review by TAMARA LAZAROFF     Wordslut, as the ironic title suggests, is a book about language, gender and power by debut author, Amanda Montell, an LA-based self-professed linguistics nerd, feminist and also magazine features editor. It’s no […]

The Grass Library by David Brooks Brandl and Schlesinger ISBN 978-0-6482026-4-6 Reviewed by JACK STANTON “If only ethics operated on the one plane,” (137), David Brooks laments in The Grass Library, which, like his previous work, evades neat classification but falls somewhere in between memoir and philosophy. On one level, The Grass Library urges his […]

Prisoncorp by Marlee Jane Ward ISBN: 9781925589542 Brio Books Reviewed by Fernanda Dahlstrom       Prisoncorp is the third volume in a young adult speculative fiction trilogy that engages with issues in contemporary Australian society. Marlee Jane Ward posits a near-future setting where current legal and economic trends have gone to an extreme, but which […]

Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko University of Queensland Press ISBN: 978 0 7022 5996 8 Reviewed by CAITLIN WILSON Talking Back: Too Much Lip, Melissa Lucashenko If this book were a sound, it would be the roar of a motorcycle down an empty road; bold, and for the moments when it’s in your path, […]