A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
Alex has often said that he likes to push language. In this collection, language and poetic form are pushed in particular ways. He has returned to the long poem, a feature of his first collection. The long poem gives the poet room to move. Let’s focus on that idea because travel, journeying—in the world, across time, and in the mind—is a major theme of this collection.
Walking on a beach on the far south coast I found a metaphor for Anna Couani’s “Local” — a deep ocean shell, cast up from the sea, weathered to reveal its interior spirals. At the apex, a perfect miniature of mature shell- the mollusc’s first home—succeeded by whorls revolving outwards. The creature inside carries its past on its back and all its history is simultaneously present— past and present touch one another.
Rose Hunter’s most recent book, Body Shell Girl (Spinifex Press, May/June 2022), is a memoir in verse that tells the story of her first two years in the sex industry. She is also the author of five other books of poetry, including glass (Five Islands Press, 2017). She has been published widely in journals in Australia, the USA, and Canada, and has been awarded an Australia Council for the Arts grant. Rose was born in Australia and lived in Canada for ten years, then Mexico for ten more. She is currently on the Gold Coast, where she is enrolled in a PhD in Creative Writing at Griffith University
Body Shell Girl is a special book – layered, creative, complicated. On one level we can approach it as a confessional, a delivery of one woman’s story where the subject matter is clear – we know Rose has created a verse novel inspired in her own words by ‘the radioactive journals’ she kept in the first two years of a decade long stint in the sex industry – in this way the book joins a conversation, a context with other books that explore this industry from different points of view.
Louise Wakeling’s latest collection begins with what might seem the familiar outlines of a city we all know and love, but she immediately starts tracking unusual pathways across it, taking on other, unfamiliar identities in order to do so.
Once considered amongst the giants of Australian literature, Katharine Susannah Prichard moved in a broad and fascinating social circle, friends with many of the literary and political greats in this country, Alfred Deakin, John Curtin, H.V. (Doc) Evatt, Miles Franklin, Vance and Nettie Palmer amongst them. Prichard, a foundation member of the Communist Party of Australia in 1921, was a writer of fiction, poetry and memoir, and lesser known as a playwright.
Simplicity and dedication are two apt words to sum up The Pink Book, a collection of images and memoirs from Henry Von Doussa. The book is a series of personal essays and collages bound in an exquisite coffee-table book; it bursts with colour and nuance yet simplicity and dedication to the characters and stories that lie within.
In this multi-layered collection, poet and activist Louise Crisp details threatened species in the East Gippsland region of Victoria, and in doing so addresses the global environmental crisis. With uncanny clarity, tree gliders, brolgas, and other local creatures draw us into a network of ecological losses.
The Density of Compact Bone is a visionary book by a poet who is also an accomplished novelist, reviewer and interviewer. Structured in four parts, it is a layered and deeply poignant collection, permeated by the twin themes of ecological precariousness and human connectedness.
Rochford Street Review 