Juncture

These books lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. In writing of their chronic and mental illnesses, the authors rupture the narrative that a successful body is a well body, and open a space for new and original accounts of how those bodies mediate the world.

This is an author who has long been interested in the nexus between publishing and technology; Ex Libris is the cumulative, and – arguably – the most ambitious result of all his hybrid ventures.

What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.

Reading and writing are bodies within bodies and rooms within each other. Fitch’s poetry is exemplary in terms of showing us the possibilities – and impossibilities (like reading in a dark room, like being in spaces we aren’t) – of the reading/writing (or pretext/text) relation. But there is no separate room or compartment where we house our reading: writing brings back all kinds of memories of mental and affective experience, including those involving digital forms, and material art.

Ask any queer girl, I have learnt, and every single one of us had that one friend, usually in high school, whom we liked a bit too much, who we were enchanted by. Sometimes a very best friend, sometimes a girl on the periphery of a friendship circle, but always, always someone we adored, regardless of whether or not we understood exactly why.

‘Begin, I tell myself, at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of a marriage of twenty years.’ It is with this line that Hilary McPhee opens the second chapter of her second memoir. It’s telling, both because it reads almost like an editorial intervention – as if the editor is present even as she writes – but also because it indicates that there’s something much more important going on than the ‘adventure’ that forms the main narrative arc of the book.

Did the student say the Outline trilogy was rendered mostly in indirect speech? Perhaps that is why – to quiver between the untruth of getting it all down and the truth of not getting it down in the right words.

The word clicked something into place. Bibliomemoir: it was books that had helped me to do this, because I didn’t know any other way to do this. I didn’t think there was anything remarkable about this way of writing the self while I was doing it: it seemed self-evident, inevitable that books would help me think about myself.

Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo…, into that of charismatic megapoems.

Josephine Rowe’s stories are about time. Time as it is lived and as it is recounted; the way it doesn’t just progress, but speeds and slows, persists and lingers.