Reviewed: Here are My Demands, Andrew Roff, Wakefield Press
A Chronicle of Becoming
Reviewed: Plastic Budgie, Olivia De Zilva, Pink Shorts Press The debut offering from Olivia De Zilva is a bildungsroman that sits somewhere between autobiography and fiction—a fragmented, although chronological, account of a young girl’s (also named Olivia) becoming. Plastic Budgie is sectioned into three parts: ‘The Past’, ‘The Present’, and ‘The Ammonite’. As the book traces Olivia’s memories, she grapples with the present and ultimately reaches an epiphany.
Strange Distances
Reviewed: The Wallace Line: A Poem, Jennifer Mackenzie, Transit Lounge The Wallace Line is a faunal boundary line in the Indo-Australian Archipelago. Drawn in the mid-nineteenth century by the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, it cuts through the Indian Ocean between Bali and Lombok, upwards into the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Celebes, and eastward—south of Mindanao—into the Philippine Sea. At its thinnest point, the line measures just 35 kilometres. This means that a distance a person could walk in a matter of hours is enough to give rise to a significant discrepancy in the animal life visible on either […]
The Weight of Adulthood
Reviewed: Cannon, Lee Lai, Giramondo Like her award-winning 2021 debut Stone Fruit, Lai’s latest graphic novel Cannon wastes no time easing readers in. Lai drops us right into the mess—literally. The opening scene is pure chaos, tables overturned, plates shattered, a restaurant in shambles. The culprit is the graphic novel’s titular protagonist, Cannon, aided and abetted by Trish, her best friend.
Australia in Three Books: Anxiety
These three books spell out an anxiety that, in 2025, is there on our newsfeeds on a daily basis.
Not like the others: on power, pedagogical relationships and being special
In Sweet Nothings, Griffiths once again delves into confessional waters by examining romantic and sexual relationships between students and their professors while ruminating on her own experience.
As above, so below
I didn’t realise that I had been aching for poems like the ones in Refugia.
Calabasas Katabasis
In a way, Squat is a victim of history.
Embracing the Ordinary
This book is not a manual but a speculation; plainness is not a product, but an ethos. We are subject to the times we live in, but we can become more than them through accepting that the lives we make for ourselves can be enough.
Crip time and chronic illness in Italy
In a society where eugenics, discrimination and funding cuts for disability supports are on the rise, this is a book that the world needs more than ever, a reminder that life with disability and chronic illness is as worthy as any other.
Eel feelings
Webster’s argument in The Slip is that the forces of grief and desire are irremediably peculiar.
Should poetry be awkward or sincere?
David Stavanger’s The Drop Off makes light of an unfortunate and consuming life situation taking place in a degrading world dominated by climate change and capitalism.