The recurring themes of this brilliantly haunting collection run a powerful range, from tragedy and trauma to innocence and carnal desire. Derr-Smith offers an intimate, unyieldingly honest account of her life and experiences. The subjects, the lines, the words all scream truth. Often brutally. Often beautifully. Her themes and approach leave a lasting impression.
Interview with Michelle Cahill on Letter to Pessoa
Michelle Cahill reads “Aubade for Larkin” and talks about her new book Letter to Pessoa, including the book’s genesis, its shifting genres (and genders), about literary connection and disconnection, about writing meta-fiction, and the intersections between writing practice and philosophical discourse,…
Interview with Andrew Joyce
Andrew Joyce joins us again to talk about his new novel Yellow Hair, about the importance of research, some of the mistakes he’s made along the way, the difference in how he’s approached his books, on writing historical fiction, on immersing himself in the Sioux culture, and more.
Divine Residues: A review of Mean Numbers by Ian Ganassi
Contradiction and absurdity reign freely, and non sequiturs pop up out of the blue, each fetched further than the last, as if the poet were striving for the most unlikely next line ever to come out of left field. The effect is to loosen up the reader’s consciousness and allow her to gaze into an open-ended world of expansive possibilities. It’s a wild world, where sense and nonsense are on an equal footing, but she soon finds that the poet has left a trail of delectible crumbs to follow.
A review of On the Blue Train by Kristel Thornell
Kristel Thornell has roll-played Agatha’s creativity and expression to perfection and delivers an excellent discourse of the famous crime writers’ intercourse with her acquaintances. Flashbacks enrich the pages and regularly remind me of her once read autobiography. The method used was very inventive, for example while partaking a Turkish bath some memories of her childhood are released and I’m overjoyed to find ‘Auntie-Grannie,’ ‘Nursie’ and the ‘Gunman’ unexpectedly arrive.
A review of Shibboleth & Other Stories edited by Laurie Steed
An outstanding collection of short stories makes up this book of the Margaret River Short Story Competition for 2016. It is sponsored by Margaret River Press, who believe the ‘short story genre is greatly undervalued’, according to their website. The competition has been run since 2011, producing five published collections so far, with the 2017 competition having just recently closed for submissions.
A review of Mattison’s Chess Endgame Studies by T. G. Whitworth
There are pawn endings and positions displaying diverse forms of material imbalance, with a particular favourite it seems being where a lone knight and advanced pawn(s) battle against rook and king (the king’s presence being important because certain key variations will often give the opportunity for a winning fork). Invariably the positions, which could very easily have arisen from practical play, contain some startling resource.
A review of Engraft By Michele Seminara
The landscape of Seminara’s poetry is often domestic – home life, motherhood, abusive relatives, relationships, aging, and illness, but there is also magical realism, shapeshifting, sublimated desire, and a range of literary influences that come through the found poems, centos, erasures and remixes. The poetry plays with metapoetic themes, with traditional rhyme schemes and rhythms, and are self-referential in a post-modern way.
A review of The Reason for Time by Mary Burns
Burns’s novel is set in Chicago in 1919. Her choice of poem to quote at the beginning and set the tone for the story is inspired. “Working Girls”, by Carl Sandburg, is about the “river of young woman-life” in that city, as factory and office girls headed off to work each morning. He contrasts the “green” stream of young innocent energy with the “gray” stream of more experienced women who say, “I know where the bloom and laughter go, and I have memories.”
A review of Letter to Pessoa by Michelle Cahill
Though each of the pieces works well individually, taken collectively, Letter to Pessoa presents a multifaceted world that builds new linguistic spaces through correspondence and conjunction. By blurring the distinctions between author and narrator/narration, reader/writer/voyeur, past/present, and even life/death, Cahill has created an exciting and powerful collection that continues to shift, change and reveal new insight with each re-reading.