It would be an understatement to say that the story behind the publication of The Antigone Poems is unusual. Created at intermittent times during the 1970s, betwixt the cities of Montreal and Toronto, this dark volume is a collaborative effort between poet Marie Slaight and her friend, artist Terrence Tasker. Forty years later, and long […]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to send a poet to New Zealand, Tasmania, South Australia, and Antarctica. Encourage her to write poems during her travels, and then publish them as a book. Well, guess what? Thanks to the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry, the University of Western Sydney, and Giramondo […]

Is it possible to feel nostalgic towards a place in which you didn’t grow up? Is it conceivable to see a version of your 15-year-old self mirrored in the actions and words of two girls with whom you share no commonalities, save for your gender? Jack Ellis, author of The Best Feeling of All, has […]

Following the success of her first collection of short stories in 2013, The Double, Australian poet Maria Takolander has returned to poetry in the form of the The End of the World, published by Giramondo Press. The volume is separated into three highly distinct parts, so distinct, in fact, one feels as though they are […]

Throughout his rich, creative life Richard James Allen has embodied many forms of artistry, from choreographer, performer, filmmaker and scholar, to acclaimed Australian poet, beginning his long list of publications and awards in the early 1980s. Nearly 40 years later his tenth book of poetry, Fixing the Broken Nightingale, from Flying Island Books, is a […]

Once sniffed at by literary critics, the short story has undergone a renaissance in recent years as reading patterns change and writers’ centres fill courses on the art of short-story writing. Technical aspects of short stories have been well examined, yet few writers have looked at how individual stories are written. Cracking The Spine goes […]

Reading Nora Krouk’s book, Warming the Core of Things, is akin to discovering a long-lost grandmother who invites you to sit by the fire and listen to her wondrous fairytales. The best bit, though, in Krouk’s case, is that these fairytales are all true and sound more like confessional journal entries than metaphorical narratives. This […]

In Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Guildenstern declares that: ‘All your life you live so close to the truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque’. And so it is with the stories […]

  This novella by Simone Lazaroo is a heart-felt, lonely and sad yet uplifting story of a young mother, Ruth Joiner, preparing for her death and preparing for her daughter’s life after she passes from the mortal coil that encases us. This, Lazaroo’s fourth novel, is a long and varied array of fictional and academic […]