Prithvi Varatharajan
Prithvi Varatharajan is a poet, essayist, and occasional literary audio producer. His work has been featured widely in journals, and his audio productions on ABC RN and at Red Room Company. His poetry collection Entries was published in 2020 by Cordite Books. He holds a PhD from the University of Queensland for a dissertation about ABC RN’s Poetica.
All essays by Prithvi Varatharajan
Literary Migrations
Sakr’s novel is teeming with the feelings of its characters: anger, despondency, ambivalence, shame, joy; with cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and school friends; with Arabic and Turkish phrases: Jamal has Lebanese family in and near Lurnea in Western Sydney, and an estranged Turkish one; with familial expectations; with violence, both threatened and enacted; with sexual acts that transgress cultural proscriptions; and with a shifting, sometimes lush literary style.
Syntactical Torque
Change Machine is an ambitious collection which has two standout accomplishments. One is its formal eclecticism and dexterity; the other is its contribution to Australian poetics in drawing on local vernacular and literary influence, and subjecting these to international currents.
Archives of Loss
Reading the losses arrayed in this anthology to write this review – even as they were tempered by expressions of joy or hope at ecological resilience, or calls for action – I felt somewhat overwhelmed. In that state, I recalled the classic Freudian account of melancholy as a mourning of loss that becomes pathological, because it is perpetual.
