AustLit

Each time I have read Cities, I have felt more of the affect of the poetical language. Yet there is a way of looking at it as a whole. Given Petra White’s themes, I can’t help alluding to Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, also Sylvia Plath’s last book Ariel. White dives into the myths to find past definitions for past and present human roles : “Tell me what a mother is”. (Introduction)

'Michelle Cahill’s debut novel Daisy & Woolf is accomplished and exhilarating. A re-reading of Virginia Woolf’s iconic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway, it excavates and reconstructs the literary worlding of a minor character, Daisy Simmons – the ‘dark, adorable’ Eurasian woman that Clarissa Dalloway’s longtime admirer, Peter Walsh, plans to marry. If you are thinking about the coupling of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre you are on the right track.' (Introduction)

'From its outset, A Kind of Magic establishes two distinct kinds of language. There’s Spargo-Ryan’s narration, as she recounts meeting with her new therapist: this voice is warm and confiding. The language she employs is vibrant and all her own: she likens her anxiety, for example, to ‘being trapped in jelly and also being allergic to jelly’(6). It’s laden with humour and irony, too: the narrator worries that the thongs she’s worn to the appointment are going to make a bad impression, and what’s more, their slapping sound might disturb the ‘sick people’ in the medical centre; the ‘patients with actual problems’(4). Within this same opening chapter, we’re introduced to a medical lexicon, which Spargo-Ryan informs us she’s become well-versed in: ‘I feel dissociated, I have intrusive thoughts’(6). These two sorts of language indicate two spheres of knowledge: the first, clinical and official; the second, intimate and embodied. The therapist’s PhD in clinical psychology is displayed on the wall; she is a ‘specialist in anxiety and psychosis’(4). But Spargo-Ryan tells us she is ‘also a specialist’ in these conditions, ‘but in the other way, where sometimes they try to kill me’(4).' (Introduction)

'After the Rain is the debut for Melbourne-based author, Aisling Smith, a previous winner of the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. The novel is an enticing exploration of diaspora and all its inherent obstacles encountered by migrants, including the internalised racism that simmers beneath benign white Australia of the 1970’s.' (Introduction)

'André Dao’s debut novel Anam is like a house with many rooms and windows, to use an image employed by its author. Its multiple locales account for the shattering, scattering, and smattering of Vietnamese people across the globe, and their resettlement in outer migrant suburbs, in Paris’ Boissy-Saint-Léger or Melbourne’s Footscray. Alongside a distinctly cosmopolitan, diasporic feel, the novel opens up a thought-provoking cultural conversation on Vietnam’s colonial and postcolonial histories – and in so doing, digs up a lot of mud. This endeavour may have been facilitated by Dao’s outsider perspective as a Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) born and having grown up in Australia, which provides him with sufficient hindsight. It is no surprise, then, that the names excavated from Vietnam’s past ought to be figures of exile, beginning with Dao’s grandfather. While a Penguin review noted how this “work of autofiction, this part-memoir, part-novel is twelve years in the making”, Dao’s grandfather spent ten years throughout the 1980s at the infamous Chi Hoa jail located in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a political prisoner of conscience under the Communist regime, before being sent away on a plane to France upon release. The narrator compares his grandfather to those decimated Angolan antelopes who are the victims of inter-imperialist rivalry and proxy wars in Africa – “he, a colonial subject of an empire that no longer exists, a forgotten ghost of an already embarrassing past”.' (Introduction)

'There is currently in Australia’s literary sector a discussion about fair employment, fair payment for authors, and promises of greater funding with the announcement of the National Cultural Policy by the Arts Minister, Hon. Tony Burke. As Jinghua Qian and Jennifer Mills wrote preliminary to a recent discussion on superannuation payments for journal contributors: “Many of us are looking forward to a stronger funding environment and the opportunity to affirm and protect the rights of writers, artists, and other literary journal contributors. Policy-level change is important, but the direct relationships between contributors and the publications that support us are also vital.”' (Introduction)

'Despite having been named the ‘poet laureate’ of Aboriginal literature by author Alexis Wright and the ‘greatest living poet in Australia’ by poet John Kinsella, Lionel Fogarty’s poetry, previously published by small independent presses, has remained both critically and popularly underappreciated. I count myself as a relative newcomer to Fogarty’s work, but with the weight of his body of work growing, the publication of his fourteenth collection, Harvest Lingo by Giramondo, presents the perfect opportunity to become acquainted with Fogarty’s fiery and yet sophisticated poetics. As Fogarty reminds us in this collection, being a poet, let alone a black protest poet in Australia, is bloody ‘Hard Work’ (4). However, for those readers who are ready to roll up their sleeves, this collection offers a rich harvest indeed: lingo that unearths a sense of global solidarity through transit across cultural and linguistic boundaries, disrupting underlying assumptions that form the solid ground of the English language in the process.' (Introduction)

'I Have Decided To Remain Vertical is an exhilarating extension and intensification of some of the major themes of Carbis’s first collection Anecdotal Evidence: her never leaving Carnegie; a family strangely functional in the wake of brokenness, as poesis summons vivid mosaics from the fragments; the devastated heart and the paradoxical sustenance it finds by revisiting the penumbra of relations; the contradiction between word and gesture; the magnetism of the loving body while the erotic body feels cancelled in its relegation to mere companionship, and the fearless probing of domestic anguish in the wake of paternal carelessness.' (Introduction)