Reviews/Essays

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 9780702260056 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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

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 […]

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, that poems […]

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 […]

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 Documentt, 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 […]

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. […]

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 […]