I’m always a little hesitant to speak about the books I’ve read. And that’s because there are so many books I haven’t read. Compared to a lot of authors I know, I get through an embarrassingly small number of books. The reason is that I read painfully slowly. Sentence by sentence, word by word. And I go back and re-read sentences just to make sure I’ve really understood and appreciated them. When I’m sure there’s no one listening, I like to read out loud, rolling each word around my mouth. And when I can’t read out loud, I read just […]

Last month, for the first time in more than a year, I slept in a bed that was not my own. At the foot of a ravine, on the bend of a river, I fed logs into flames and drank red wine. I poked coals and consumed Sarah Sentilles’ Draw Your Weapons until the evening turned charcoal. Then I settled under the star-shot sky to think about the connections she had drawn between art and philosophy, trauma and morality. Later I lay in bed and, through the bleed of rain down the wall-length window, read the constellations. To the sound of […]

I am drinking tea, made in a blue enamel teapot. It is lukewarm. I need to either finish or reheat it. I live on Wurundjeri country. Today, this week, I am on Darug and Gundungurra country. I am mindful of having a safe place to read and write while devastation racks India, and Palestine. Because I’m doing a PhD, I am reading a lot of different things all at once, greedy for the thoughts of others. I was drawn to study because I’d entered a cycle of disaffection with my writing that felt untenable. I needed a breath. I wondered […]

Arab-Australian Literature is having a moment. A few months ago, the poet Omar Sakr walked away with a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his stunning collection, The Lost Arabs (UQP, $24.95), and Randa Abdel-Fattah launched her Coming of Age in The War On Terror (New South Books, $34.95). A few weeks ago, writer and activist Sara Saleh won the prestigious Peter Porter poetry prize for her poem A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting. A few days ago, I launched Sara Haghdoosti’s debut novel, Sunburnt Veils (Wakefield Press, $24.95) at an in-conversation event at Readings. In a few months’ time, I will be […]

You can’t read Hamlet. Try taking it out of your bag in a doctor’s waiting room or sitting on a train. There is no edition out there that can ambiguate that heavy-weight six-letter title or ameliorate the feeling you are somehow being silly and somehow up to something, the ultimate milquetoast pretending to read. I don’t think you could even take it out near the office of your favourite English professor without sensing you’ve committed a grave social error. Hamlet is the kind of thing only Hamlet would read (surely someone has said this before). Perhaps Hamlet would read Hamlet […]

I’ve been reading too much; I haven’t been reading enough. We’ve been in a pandemic for a year now and I have whiplash from having to pivot so hard so often. At first it feels like all I read is the news and policy directives. My attention span is gone too, reading is harder than it was. When I cast my mind back to write this, all sense of chronology is gone—time is a circle, and the circle is a zero. First, I read Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, and wonder if there is any hope for us at all. […]

Early this year, days after my dog died and before I became lit up with the pale-blue fire of a bout of mania, I became fascinated again with the work of Robert Lowell. As a young man, I had encountered the poet in the corners of a classroom I went spectacularly mad in, my nose always bleeding, and found him stodgy. He was another one of those fuckers who makes you work, I thought, and who unravels himself only when you begin applying the thumb-press of analysis. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted poetry that was rude; that made […]

For as long as I can remember, my reading material has formed a kind of orbit around me. Every time I read a new sentence, particularly when the book is good, and it’s good surprisingly often, it feels like a re-negotiation of the world. My reading matter tends to be multi-genred and multi-modal. I like to surround myself with different types of texts, so it would be normally an audiobook on the way to work, some poetry on the bedside table, and a novel or two by the sofa. I will immerse myself in both poetry and fiction most evenings […]

I didn’t move to Mexico to fall in love. It happened, as love does, unexpectedly. Prior to meeting my partner, I knew that I would have to pick up my long-lost Spanish where I had left it more than 15 years ago: on bits of scrap paper, my homework written hastily in between classes and hangovers while I was studying at the University of Sydney. Learning Spanish all those years ago was a lesson in what not to do, I mumbled to myself when I took the mandatory entry exam to restart my learning. If I was going to live […]

The future is now When my brother left home in the 90s for the blinking lights of the IT boom, he gifted me something. I’d grown up with his penchant for sci-fi and intense 70s prog, but this was new: a space man called David Bowie. Unlike Freddy Mercury, who I wanted to marry, I didn’t want to be with Bowie: I wanted to be Bowie. Or, no, it’s more psychological than that. Our dad had died just before I was born and my 12-year-old brain pretty much slotted Bowie in as a vague approximation. I had, after all, grown […]

Reading American Literature Readying myself for isolation during the Great Pandemic of 2020, I naturally went to my local bookstore to stockpile necessities, had a heavy discussion with one of the sellers about finally making time to reread old favourites. He named the Russians and I said Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, having secretly claimed African American literature a birthright since leaving my home in the United States twenty-one years ago, my skin white like spaces between the words that have consistently taught me right from wrong. I remember being twelve, newly bleeding. It’s near-to summer and the scent of magnolia […]

A Burns Philp general store was my childhood gateway to the world. My parents were based in Kavieng, the main town on the island of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. The general store commandeered the main street, providing expatriates with some basic comforts from overseas. It was also the only place on the island that stocked books. Amongst the jumble of shelves displaying canned food, processed cheese and tins of powdered milk, was a solitary, somewhat lopsided, arrangement of idiosyncratic titles. Restocking of this shelf was haphazard. But whenever it was replenished, I pleaded with Mum to spend a […]