AustLit
Latest Issues
Notes
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Only literary material by Australian authors individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Cold drops of rain and Year of Darkness by Vyacheslav Konoval
A distinct personal vocabulary by Audrey Molloy
Natalia Figueroa Barroso reviews How not to Drown in a Glass of Water
Martin Edmond reviews mō taku tama by Vaughan Rapatahana
Zarlasht Sarwari reviews My Pen is the Wing of a Bird
Gemma Parker reviewsWhere We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks
Contents
- Community Possum Skin Cloaki"monoprinted ferns", single work poetry
- Mysticsi"Last night you saved my life", single work poetry
- The Floori"She took off her earth-caked shoes", single work poetry
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The Sedulity of Soldier Crabsi"It’s Boxing Day and the sun climbs a lattice work of cirrus clouds, dripping like treacle in the early",
single work
poetry
This poem is in five numbered parts.
- Duplex (Eremophila ‘Blue Horizon’)i"I have always adored the desert,", single work poetry
- Bak Kut Tehi"肉: You peel the chilli, layer by layer, unearthing a clot of", single work poetry
- Foundation, single work
- Notei"When I wake up", single work poetry
- International, single work prose
- Kaa, single work short story
- Melonshine, single work short story
- Index of First Lines, single work prose
- Selene, single work short story
- Butterfly, single work short story
- Notes on Loss, single work prose
- Alicia Marsden in Conversation with Michelle Cahill, Alicia Marsden (interviewer), single work interview
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Adele Dumont Reviews Childhood by Shannon Burns,
single work
review
— Review of Childhood : A Memoir 2022 single work autobiography ;'Anyone writing about their childhood must grapple with the intervening gulf of time, and with the strange slipperiness of memory. This is especially so for Shannon Burns, who today lives a stable, contented life in the higher echelons of Australia’s middle class, but whose early years, he now recognises, were chaotic and perilous, peopled by adults who were unreliable, volatile, and sometimes violent. Childhood charts Burns’ upbringing in 1980s suburban Adelaide: he is passed between his mother (his ‘true home’ (88)), his father and stepmother, various relatives, and foster carers. Aged fifteen, he leaves school, escapes his father’s place and finds work in a recycling centre. Despite all this dislocation and instability, and despite Burns’ well-developed talent for forgetting, Childhood doesn’t read as fragmentary or disjointed: rather, the narrative is sculpted so skilfully that it is never less than propulsive.'(Introduction)
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Ben Hession Reviews Sydney Spleen by Toby Fitch,
single work
review
— Review of Sydney Spleen 2021 selected work poetry ;'Sydney Spleen is the latest collection of poetry by Toby Fitch. Its title alludes to Charles Baudelaire’s volume of prose poems, Paris Spleen. Whilst for Baudelaire, there was a desire to import the expansiveness and consequent wider palette of nuances of prose into poetry, Fitch, in his collection, utilizes a mix of styles, including prosaic lyricism and a continuation of his experimentations with form and language as seen in Rawshock and Bloomin Notions of Other and Beau. The latter, in turn, owe more to the likes of Mallarmé, with their intrinsic strategies of deconstruction being explored in Fitch’s essay, Aussi/Or. The poems in Sydney Spleen are an acutely intimate response to a period of personal challenges for Fitch, with many focusing on the effects of a city wracked by the concurrent disasters of the 2019-2020 bushfires, the COVID-19 pandemic. Fitch writes with disarming candour, and his skill in intimating his experiences capture the unease that for many permeates the recent cultural memory.' (Introduction)
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Alison Hatzantonis Reviews Stamiata [sic] X by Effie Carr,
single work
review
— Review of Stamatia X 2018 single work novel ;'Years ago, when my first baby was a few months old, my half Greek, Australian born husband and I took Greek language lessons. In the depth of winter on cold cold nights I would leave my baby sound asleep in her Yia yia’s care and traipse across the city to a freezing concrete classroom to study the language with a Cretan lady called Crisanthe.' (Introduction)
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Adam Aitken Reviews Spirit Level by Marcelle Freiman,
single work
review
— Review of Spirit Level 2021 selected work poetry ;'Marcelle Freiman’s collection poems Spirit Level, her third book, surely deserves Jill Jones’ endorsement as a book where ‘clarity of memory [sits] alongside a shimmer of location’, whose ‘presences and absences’ are to be savoured. As restless, dynamic, and ‘unsettled’ as her earlier two collections, White Lines and Monkey’s Wedding, (which I reviewed on its publication). This new collection is structured into two parts, the first contains many poems about memories: of childhood in South Africa, of Freiman’s student days as an anti-Apartheid activist, and of parents and Jewish relatives killed and dispersed by the Holocaust. The second part of the collection explores various subjects, with many poems with Australian locations and subjects, including a number of poems on art and photography. Together the poems provide a vivid picture of the life of a South African migrant now settled in Australia. The deeper theme is the poet’s engagement with the past, not so much as nostalgia, but about how her present sensibility is now ineluctably imbricated with these memories. The poems bring a sense of presence to memory and amplify memory’s affective power, because the affect is often tied to traumatic events.'(Introduction)