One distinguishing feature of this collection may not be noticed by the reader right away, and that is it is not a collection constructed linearly. Unlike so many poetry collections, it is not a series of poems building to a point. It is, rather, as its title suggests, a poetry of juxtaposed conditions or states.
An Interview with The Arsonist’s Chloe Hooper
Chloe Hooper’s Explosive new True Crime book, The Arsonist,is founded upon the seemingly straight-forward question – what kind of person would deliberately start a fire? Told in Hooper’s inimitable, lyrical style, she seeks to answer such a question through the lens of the Black Saturday tragedy, a firestorm that devastated swathes of rural Victoria in 2009. In this in-depth interview, she talks about the book, her themes, characters, and processes, and much more.
A review of Where the Lost Things Go By Anne Casey
Where the Lost Things Go is a powerful book. The immediate accessibility of the poetry does not diminish the impact of the work, which moves through key moments in life, tracking grief, loss, ageing, parenting, and what it means to take a stance in a world where the need for compassion as a political gesture–deep-seated humanism–is greater than it has ever been.
A review of Not Her Daughter by Rea Frey
The chain of events that follow set off a list of moral and psychological issues for the characters, but readers will likely find themselves questioning what they would do in a similar situation.
A review of In The Tree We Planted and Buried You In by Billie R Tadros
The title emphasizes the orthogonal relationship between the ever-presence of a loved one in presence and in absence. Almost as if love itself is a kind of eu-trauma. A poetics that attempts to grasp the complexity of loving as, with, and through trauma.
A review of The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright
There is so much about the human condition that is illuminated here in these beautifully written pieces. Wright takes the painful, the personal and the often unbearable frailty of life, and expands it so that the work becomes a celebration of being alive, of human resilience and of the beauty of the everyday.
A review of Women are Like Chickens by Annette Sandoval
The yarn Sandoval spins of their lives, instead, would make an HBO show-runner proud. Death, love, and food are never too far from each other; episodes of powerful yearning, comical justice, and occasional violence replace each other at a cinematic pace.
An interview with Margaret Pearce
The author of the Dungeons and Dragons inspired Mission Perilous talks about her latest book, her upbringing, her writing journey and process, her work in progress, her biggest challenges, her favourite author and lots more.
A review of Reykjavík by Tom Maremaa
What Reykjavík does get absolutely right is the Russian regime’s century-long predilection for poisoning its critics, dissidents and traitors. Arkadi Vaksberg’s meticulous history The Poison Laboratory: From Lenin to Putin (Gallimard) details the state’s expertise at home and abroad in silencing its enemies, all the way from Lenin’s order in 1921 to create a poison laboratory.
A review of The Stendhal Summer by Laurie Levy
The Stendhal Summer takes the risk of being uncomprehended, yet pays us the compliment of presuming we have lived a little. Thus, mentions of Jean-Louis Barrault, Yves Montand, and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André (1981), to name just a few examples, either mean something to us or they do not. When they do, they conjure a world of meaning, or an image captured in time, or the tone of a conversation. Such resonances are strange and powerful.