AustLit

'Introducing They Cannot Take the Sky, a collection of testimonies from people in detention on Manus and Nauru, Christos Tsiolkas wrote of the intellectual abstraction necessary to make refugees’ futures fodder for public debate: “We forget that the asylum seeker and the refugee is a real person, with a real body and a real consciousness, that they are as human as we are.” Such wilful forgetting is impossible once we’ve borne witness to their stories, in all their human singularity.'  (Introduction)

'Poetry and comedy meet in Ali Whitelock’s poetry collection and my heart crumples like a coke can. As in a stand-up routine, these poems offer sharp social observation, frankness played for laughs and nourishing doses of swearing. And as with the best poetry, they refresh our language, pay homage to tradition as the generative source of art, and surprise and delight as wit slides into beauty or pathos. The effect of the defamiliarisations and transformations of both comedy and poetry can be invigorating. The reader receives a double shot of revitalisation here.'  (Introduction)