Reviews/Essays

out of emptied cups by Anne Casey ISBN: 978-1-912561-74-2 Salmon Poetry Launched by ELEANOR HOOKER The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote poetry is a ‘dividend from what you know and what you are’. I am going to tell you about Anne Casey, the person, things I imagine you already know – Anne is a powerhouse, […]

Jungle Without Water and Other Stories by Sreedhevi Iyer Gazebo Books ISBN: 9780987619143 Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA     The good things in this collection of short stories, Jungle Without Water, are very good indeed. But before talking about some of them in detail I want to briefly touch on the major theme of […]

The short story of you and I by Richard James Allen UWAPublishing ISBN 9781760800215 Reviewed by Kyra Bandte At first, The short story of you and I by Richard James Allen seems to exist in the liminal space between awake and asleep; the space where your psyche turns the familiar sound and scene around you into […]

The Red Pearl and Other Stories By Beth Yahp Vagabond Press, 2017 ISBN 978-1-922181-51-0 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET Australian, Malaysian-born writer Beth Yahp’s short story collection The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017) navigates between different locations and time periods. It is resolutely transnational and transhistorical in nature. At times, the collection veers towards the […]

Down The Hume by Peter Polites Hachette, 2017 ISBN:9780733635564 Reviewed by HAROLD LEGASPI   There is not a simple matter of homogenous ‘queer’ voice, literary or otherwise (Hurley, 2010). As poststructuralist theorists have contended, for various historical and social reasons, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are discursively unstable and contested categories (Jagose, 2002) and homosexuality is ‘a […]

Coach Fitz by Tom Lee Giramondo ISBN : 9781925336900 Reviewed by JAKE GOETZ   Ever since the Little Athletics of my youth, I’ve always felt Australia to be a sporting nation. One that if viewed from an alien planet, could be mistaken as preparing for war through daily gym appointments, jogs and football. From my […]

The Artist’s Portrait by Julie Keys ISBN 9780733640940 Hachette Reviewed by VICTORIA NUGENT The Artist’s Portrait by Julie Keys, is not an easy novel to categorise. It’s not exactly a page turner but it simmers along with a slow sense of intrigue. It’s not quite a murder mystery, not quite drama, not quite historical fiction. […]

Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos translated by Alice Whitmore ISBN 9781925336962 Giramondo Reviewed by SAMANTHA TRAYHURN     We’re alone together, for the first time. I have to touch him now. I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder. But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest the way they said it would… (p.1). There […]

The Burning Elephant by Christoher Raja Giramondo ISBN 978-1-922146-92-2 Book Launch Speech by NICHOLAS JOSE   Asia Pacific Writers & Translators Guangzhou Kuei Yuan Café Gallery 24 November 2016 Who would have thought I would be launching Chris Raja’s beautiful book here in Guangzhou? Such is the river of life that flows into the ocean […]

Autobiochemistry by Tricia Dearborn UWAP, 2019 ISBN 978-1-76080-022-2 Reviewed by ROSE LUCAS   What are the elements – multiple, multivalent – which constitute and compose us as individuals, as bodies in time and place? What are the factors which make each of us precisely who we are, as well as who we might become? In […]

AXIS Book I: ‘Areal’ by a.j. carruthers Vagabond Press ISBN: 978-1-922181-32-9 Reviewed by TERRI ANN QUAN SING Ambitious beyond itself; larger than the sum of a single collection; AXIS is a ‘lifelong long poem’; it is the first book-length installment spanning axes one through thirty-one. Since the publication of AXIS Book I: ‘Areal’ an additional eighteen […]

The Book of Thistles by Noëlle Janaczewska Review by VIVIENNE GLANCE ISBN: 978 174 258 8049 UWA Publishing “Plants that stand for us that stand for themselves as we stand for ourselves.” P. 164 These lines appear around half-way through Noëlle Janaczewska’s The Book of Thistles. They are an apt summary of this ‘part accidental […]

Rain Birds By Harriet McKnight ISBN 9781863959827 Black Inc Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA Harriet McKnight’s brilliant, moving novel reminded me of a book I had read a long time before, in 2006. That was Kate Legge’s The Unexpected Elements of Love, a novel that explores some of the same themes that McKnight incorporates into […]

Journey to Horseshoe Bend by T.G.H. Strehlow ISBN : 978-1-922146-77-9 Giramondo Reviewed by JAMES PAULL If not for the Christian gravesite, the book-cover image of Central Australia might appear an all too familiar trope. Industries as much cultural as primary have engaged in modes of wealth extraction from this landscape. In mid-century modernist mythography, for […]

The Measure of Skin by Ramon Loyola Vagabond Press ISBN 978-1-925735-14-7 Reviewed by FELICITY PLUNKETT Poets have recurrent signatures – words, images, modes and motifs – imprints unique as a fingerprint’s whorl. For Philippines-born poet, editor, lawyer and writer of short fiction, Ramon Loyola, one of these is just this: images of skin, literal and figurative, […]

The Discomfort of Self-Recognition For many years, books have documented the literary rivalries of writers—Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, A. S. Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble—but Gabrielle Carey’s novella length book Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall (2018) is the first I’ve read to examine […]

Hijabi in Jeans by Isil Cosar Guillotine Press ISBN 978-0-6481693-3-8 Reviewed by ZOYA PATEL From the very first poem, it is clear that Hijabi In Jeans by H.I. Cosar is a deeply personal, and deeply political collection, entwining the two themes to carry through every piece. Cosar, a Turkish-Australian teacher and writer has spoken of […]

The World Was Whole By Fiona Wright Giramondo ISBN: 978-1-925336-97-9 Reviewed by GABRIELLA MUNOZ   With four published books, poet, essayist and critic Fiona Wright has become an important voice in the Australian literary scene. Born in 1983 in New South Wales, Wright published her first collection of poems, Knuckled, in 2011. In it, she […]

On Patrick White by Christos Tsiolkas ISBN 9781863959797 Black Inc Reviewed by Jean-François Vernay “Perhaps, in spite of Australian critics, writing novels was the only thing I could do with any degree of success, even my half-failures were some justification of an otherwise meaningless life.” ——- Paul Brennan & Christine Flynn  If one were to pool […]

No Friend But The Mountains by  Behrouz Boochani translated by Omid Tofighian Picador ISBN: 9781760555382 Reviewed by HOA PHAM Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, playwright and activist whose book, No Friend But the Mountain was written by text message over a couple of years on Manus Prison. The resulting work is a powerful, readable […]