Letter to Pessoa is Michelle Cahill’s debut collection of short fiction. The stories are told from a single, often first-person perspective, with many written in an epistolary format. The narrators …
Digesting Grief: Krissy Kneen’s Eating My Grandmother: a grief cycle
(edited by Robyn Cadwallader) In Krissy Kneen’s 2009 memoir Affection, her grandmother Dragitsa Marusic (aka Lotty Kneen) was introduced as the family’s best storyteller, and as a person who did …
The Mother Load: Consolation and Happiness in Lorraine McGuigan’s Blood Plums and Lucy Williams’ internal weather
Review by Phillip Hall These two books from Walleah Press explore our intimate familial relationships in ways that prize domestic security while interrogating the many things that would threaten it, …
A MERCY BRANCHES OUT: The Poetry of Maurice Manning (Tamara Miles)
I am never quite certain, as I read the poetry of Maurice Manning, whether his heart lives in a foreign country — the one he might call heaven — or …
The Right Amount of Danger: Benjamin Dodds reviews Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Hazards
Sarah Holland-Batt has made a friend of variety. As we saw in her debut collection Aria and see again in her follow-up work The Hazards, she well and truly embraces …
Australia’s Conflict of Values over Live Exports: P.S. Cottier reviews Backlash by Bidda Jones & Julian Davies
Review by P.S. Cottier As I was reading Backlash, the NSW State Liberal Government and the ACT Labor (with a dash of Green) Government announced that they would both abolish …
Parts of An Enticing, Profit-less Whole: Finlay Lloyd’s Smalls
Review by Nigel Featherstone It is a widely held view that the publishing industry is currently going through a rough patch. Or, to put it more dramatically, it is in …
A Review of the 2016 Sydney International Women’s Poetry & Arts Festival
by Michele Seminara One of the major feminist festivals in Sydney, the third annual International Women’s Poetry and Arts Festival took place at NSW Parliament House on March 16. The …
Claiming Ground in the Imagination of Place: Martin Langford’s Ground
Ground is Martin Langford’s latest book and it features on its cover a black-and-white photograph of cloud. In choosing this clever image, Puncher & Wattmann’s cover designer Matthew Holt is …
Sydney International Women’s Poetry & Arts Festival 2016
Sydney International Women’s Poetry & Arts Festival joins with the Women Poets International Movement (MPI) for the third year in a row to bring the Woman Scream Festival 2016 to …