Books
Unseen Stories of Women: Miriam Wei Wei Lo reviews ‘If There is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears’ by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon
Gazebo Books 2023.
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon writes poetry from and about the female body.
Her opening collection, First Blood was a gritty exploration of girlhood that challenged cultural expectations of ideal femininity. Her second collection If There is a Butterfly continues to centre female bodily experience, taking pregnancy, birth, and motherhood into her orbit.
The beauty and the strangeness: Russell Smith launches ‘James Joyce: A Life’ by Gabrielle Carey
And it was then that Gabrielle began to teach me how to read Finnegans Wake: in a group, reading aloud, going very slowly, line by line, everyone pitching in suggestions and ideas, without too much concern for what might be right or wrong, sense or nonsense, just taking pleasure in the beauty and the strangeness and the glorious and often hilarious inventiveness of the language.
A dynamic web: Alice Wanderer launches ‘A Ghost Gum Leans Over’ by Myron Lysenko
Myron’s haiku are sparse, highly disciplined and written directly from his experience. Each can be read as a whole poem, but four of the five sections in this collection also loosely combine to tell stories. The fifth consists of occasional haiku and includes 33 haiku each dedicated to specific friends.
Playful complexity: Mark Roberts reviews ‘Flying North for Winter’ by Pete Spence
Pete Spence is a poet/artist who stands, for the most part, outside the mainstream of Australian poetry. Over decades Spence has built up a considerable body of work, most of it appearing in small independent magazines and in books and chapbooks published by small presses. Which brings us to his 2022 chapbook Flying North for Winter, published by now orries press.
Humour and humanity: Jennifer Harrison launches ‘Poetry of Home: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology’
I was not prepared for the humour and humanity of these poems. Their sheer excellence.
Awakening our rage: Rosemary Nissen-Wade reviews ‘Witches, Women and Words’ by Beatriz Copello
Unacquainted with Beatriz Copello’s work before (but eager now to catch up) I was drawn to this book because I’m both a poet and a witch
Breakages are part of the story: Rosanna Licari launches ‘Seams of Repair’ by Stephanie Green
Stephanie Green is a versatile and accomplished writer. Not only has she published criticism, screen studies and biography as a university lecturer, she has also written in various genres such as poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction and travel essays in literary magazines, anthologies and journals, most recently in Live Encounters, StylusLit, Axon, Meniscus and Queensland Review.
Sightlines at work: Alice Wanderer reviews ‘This Overflowing Light’ by Rin Ishigaki
Opening this book at random, I reread a poem that seems simply to capture an idyllic moment. The poet stands on a steamship, an apple in her hand.
Rochford Street Review 