In early 1971, two Newcastle teenagers are overcome with sapphic appetites. Each is inflamed with lust for her childhood best friend, the literal girl next door. What to do about this forbidden desire? The first – Limb One – acts on her hunger. She enjoys a golden summer of covert fucking, before being discovered by her parents in flagrante delicto. After being beaten and kicked out of home, she hitches a ride to Sydney. True to herself, she is homeless and alone at sixteen. The second – Limb Two – follows the more well-worn path of repression. She buries her desires, acquires a boyfriend, studies hard. The good girl, beloved by her parents. One conundrum, two choices. How will the dice fall?

In Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Joseph Acquisto borrows a definition of poetry from Phillipe Jaccottet: ‘that key that you must always keep on losing’. Attempting to know its subject, poetry reveals that there is always more to know. But the French poet’s metaphor, for Acquisto, does not mean ‘simple contingency’. It suggests ‘a complex play of certainty and doubt … that actively resists coming to a conclusion’. We might say that poetry expresses the friction in human experience between time and permanence.

Can people have too much wealth? Does extreme wealth have negative consequences? Over the past thirty years, there has been a remarkable rise in the number of billionaires whose annual earnings are so large that they are often difficult to comprehend. To take but one example, it was estimated in 2022 by Forbes magazine that Elon Musk’s personal assets were worth $219 billion and that, if he worked for forty-five years, his lifetime hourly rate from these assets was in the order of US$1,871,794.

In scene-setting a discussion of Lia Hills’s The Desert Knows Her Name, it is difficult to avoid going straight to the matter of genre. What we have is postcolonial, outback-noir eco-fiction. This genre mash-up isn’t new and is arguably a defining fictional mode of post-settlement Australia’s third century. As a form, it provides a meeting place where authors, both Indigenous (Melissa Lucashenko, Julie Janson) and non-Indigenous (Alex Miller, Tim Winton, and Gail Jones), meet to worry through complexly entangled fears around colonialism’s dark legacy, personal trauma, social dysfunction, and environmental degradation. And it isn’t territory new to Hills, as readers familiar with her previous (second) novel, The Crying Place (2017), will be aware.

Pilgrimages to war cemeteries have long been part of the rituals of Australian remembrance. It is easy to understand why veterans and the parents and siblings of the men who died in war make these journeys. But why do younger generations do so today, more than a century after World War I and eight decades after World War II? These were not their battles, nor their wars. Why do they seek out the semi-sacred spaces of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries? And why do they weep over the grave of someone whom they have never met?

What then? sang Plato’s ghost.’ Editors Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell begin their Preface to the massive Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats with the poet’s own injunction to old age. And what a life it was: seventy-three years lived over two world wars; a mammoth literary oeuvre criss-crossing Victorian melancholy, Romantic sublimity, and Modernist apocalypse. At different times and sometimes simultaneously, Yeats was a bohemian raconteur in the Cheshire Cheese pub, a radical nationalist leader of the Irish Revival, a cosmopolitan disciple of the occult, and a waspish senator enraged by the philistinism of the Irish Free State.

Jews are central to narratives of the history of modern France. One narrative thread concerns a story of civic emancipation from the time when Jews were first granted equal rights during the French Revolution until the present, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is not only France’s youngest postwar prime minister but also, like his predecessor Élisabeth Borne, of Jewish ancestry. The other narrative thread is of continuing anti-Semitism, most obvious in the Vichy government’s active participation in the deportation of Jews during World War II and still evident in the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents reported in France every year. The Dreyfus Affair is pivotal to both narratives.

In E.L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (his 1994 novel of post-civil war America), the narrator McIlvaine addresses the reader: ‘We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There is nothing quaint or colourful about us.’ Doctorow reminds the reader that our sense of modernity is an illusion. As Delia Falconer has eloquently noted apropos Doctorow’s novel, the contemporary historical novelist has a valuable role to play:

In her fifth full-length poetry collection, Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant, Nandi Chinna continues to write about her engagement with the natural world. Authored in collaboration with Wagaba Nyikina Warrwa Elder, Anne Poelina, this book sees her move north and west into the Kimberley. This is where the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) runs through Bunuba, Gooniyandi, Nyikina, Walmajarri, and Wangkatjungka Country. It is a place that poetry readers will recognise from the geographically proximate classic Reading the Country (1984) by Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke, and Krim Bentarrak, Ngarla Songs (2003) by Alexander Brown and Brian Geytenbeek, and the ethnopoetic George Dyungayan’s Bulu Line (2014), edited by Stuart Cooke. With that in mind, Chinna’s Kimberley is a place that is remote for many readers, but not entirely unknown.

I began Mandi Gray’s book while waiting for the judgment to be handed down in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. I had tuned into the live-streamed trial months earlier, along with 124,444 others, to hear Brittany Higgins being interrogated about her recollections of that fateful night in Parliament House. Gray’s argument – that some men were using defamation law to inflict further abuse and punishment on their victims, to cow them into silence, to chill public discussion of sexual violence – seemed apt indeed.