Juncture

Lemon begins like a conventional crime novel – there’s a detective interrogating a suspect, trying to pin the murder of a young woman onto an obviously vulnerable young man.

History happens to us in dreams: it is experienced and understood there as much as in our waking lives.

What the First Nations writers in This All Come Back Now reveal is that the only civilization in need of saving is the present western capitalist one – for its capacity to self-destruct and for its inability to listen.

We can view Don Mee Choi as a kind of bricoleur in DMZ Colony; a quilt maker, image assembler, improviser, who uses multiple tools – research, fiction, memoir – to assemble the beginnings of an archive.

‘This idea of difference, reinforcing difference through representation, and how this relates to social power, is what I want to use this book as an opportunity to think more about.’

The rush to push out COVID literature and thinkpieces is troubling, if only because surely the pandemic has taught us the value of slowing down, of being wary of endless production in all its forms. Surely, the pandemic should have taught us, if nothing else, to take time, if we are privileged enough to be able to do so. Yet I write this knowing about the economic necessity to write – this review is also, in a literal sense, born out of economic necessity.

‘What is most important to me is to write a strong text. My intentions are aesthetic, not therapeutic. The work of research, composition, revision, structuring, is what absorbs me utterly and what brings me repeatedly to the page.’

When I began
reading how to make a basket
I wanted to find out what I could do
with the text. How would I tend to
the ‘how to’ aspect of its title?

At their core, both Sydney and Signs and Wonders are books that think with what she calls ‘complicated feelings’. This is not simply to say that Falconer writes essays about feeling that are themselves keenly felt. More than this, the essayist determined to see ‘how this world goes’ must see it feelingly, as if mapping the dark room of insight with her hands.

Probert gives impossibly big and broad questions a usable, necessarily narrow focus by asking these questions through the perspective of one person as migrant gardener.