Reviews

After being cooped up for so long, and after enduring all the grief that comes with life, with none of…

We have been aware for centuries that we are responsible for the earth’s denudation: its ‘cold staring spaces’, as English…

In a quietly melancholy way, Bewilderment is a politically defeated novel, and perhaps in a deeper sense defeatist.

Building on and breaking from more than a decade of writing, Lahiri’s Whereabouts (2021) is the product of a becoming which refracts life through the medium of a new linguistic lens.

Who knows what lies ahead for Hong Kong? Its literature shows what did unfold and, collected and translated here under John Minford’s expert guidance, lets us share in what Hong Kong people care so much about.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction brings together and solidifies a genealogy of what First Nations creative nonfiction could be through documenting a gathering of lyric essays that push and expand the boundaries of nonfiction beyond the auto/biographical and/or the academic. In doing this, Shapes of Native Nonfiction invites and gives shape to an approach to First Nations nonfiction that demonstrates moving beyond ethnographic and academic methods; one that experiments with form and embarks on carefully crafting and re-crafting interventions that both challenge and expand existing genre structures.

What makes a book distinct from a meme if both are dependent on a web of intertextual references, some of which are digital and some which rely on the printed page?

I didn’t necessarily like school but I understood what it wanted from me. My year level had 330 students, yet I managed to graduate as dux and received an equity scholarship at the University of Queensland which quite literally changed the material conditions of my life. I didn’t like telling people at university where I went to school or that I came from a single parent family that lived on welfare. I didn’t understand how some students talked so easily with lecturers. Class preparation was googling how to pronounce things like ‘Michel Foucault’. But this was water to tread, for the moral was that you never complained. It would be ungrateful.

Rather than read representations of land in terms of the politics they support or contest, what happens when we read poems of politics through the entity of the land? I am suggesting that this is (continues to be) the primary way to read Australian poetry as Australian poetry, politically. (Readings of poetry through lenses of class or other struggle are not primary in terms of their national character, only as they, too, relate to land.) My test case is Marty Hiatt’s long poem ‘the manifold’.

The cover of The Rabbits, showing a Hills Hoist and overgrown lawn, indicates something hiding in this suburban household, even as an outsized sun bears down, reminding us of the deep shadows it can cast.