Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis
Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis is a writer, artist and small-time publisher of poetry and artist books. She divides her time between Melbourne and Perth, where she is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. Her poetry, short fiction and reviews have been published online, and in print in various magazines, journals and anthologies. She blogs at gravelly views and ratas editions.
All essays by Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis
Creature comforts: The Wonders by Paddy O’Reilly
The Wonders is an allegorical novel with worthy intentions. However, O’Reilly’s attempt to unpack a surfeit of twenty-first century issues – including animal welfare, human rights, the cult of celebrity, ecology, conservation, disability and gender politics – is marred by over-simplification and a tendency to parrot clichéd and prosaic opinions.
Wave after wave: when they came / for you elegies / of resistance
Barnett’s language works in a kind of shorthand: the reader is left to fill in the blanks, provide conjunctions, make connections. Sense is not a product of grammatical syntax but of progressions and repetitions. Names, place names and languages other than English – there are lengthy quotations in French from sources as diverse as Derrida, Mao Tse Tung, Wittgenstein and the Bible – are given equal weight and poetic rephrasing.
Humiliations accrue: Transactions by Ali Alizadeh
Alizadeh is an acclaimed poet and academic, and a self-confessed ‘unashamedly political writer’… In Transactions, he uses extreme examples of disenfranchisement, disempowerment and the unrestrained exercise of power to expose the inequities of the capitalist system and shock the reader out of his or her complacency.
