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Poetry

Ghost Poetry by Robbie Coburn & Wingbeat by Tim Kinsella

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August 2025, no. 478

Grief, depression, and trauma do terrible things to the human body and spirit. The brain rebels callously against its vessel, leaving the wounded mind to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, perpetually refreshing pain and obsessively seeking out the recesses of scarred memories.

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Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim & Re:Vision by Isi Unikowski

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August 2025, no. 478

The poems of Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim and Re:Vision by Isi Unikowski are poems of cartography; they map the unknown and probe the world with human curiosity, tracing meaning onto elusive places, feelings, and encounters, solidifying these through the writing process. Both collections conspire to understand the world as they construct their realities one line at a time, the poems themselves moving – in the former’s case, vertically from the deep sea, and, in the latter’s case, through the casting of light, the revealing of landscapes.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, Felicity Plunkett reviews new collections of Antigone Kefala’s poetry and fiction, observing that the belated recognition of this major Australian figure suggests that Kefala has moved beyond the designation ‘migrant writer’.

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Kirli Saunders (OAM) is a proud Gunai Woman and multi-award-winning writer, artist, singer-songwriter, and consultant. Kirli creates to connect, to make change. She was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts in 2022. Kirli is the author of eight books, including Bindi (2020), Returning (2023), Afloat (2024), and Eclipse (2025). Her theatre show Yandha Djanbay will tour in 2026.

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Eclipse by Kirli Saunders & Mettle by Anne-Marie Te Whiu

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July 2025, no. 477

What is immediately striking about Kirli Saunders’s Eclipse and Anne-Marie Te Whiu’s Mettle is that although both collections have much in common it is the differences that engage the reader. Saunders is a Gurnai woman and Te Whiu an Australian of Māori heritage: both poets write with an assurance and freedom founded on their respective heritages and the political struggles of an earlier generation of First Nations writers. In consequence, the poetry in both collections is precise and individual in its consideration and depiction of contemporary First Nation lives and subjectivities.

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Peter Rose, the editor, for just under a quarter of a century, of these pages, has put down his scissors and pot of glue to turn seventy (in June) and step back into civilian life. Coincidentally or not, he has also just put out another book of poems, Attention, Please!, his first since The Subject of Feeling in 2015. The new title – a softened imperative – speaks aptly and cannily for the contents.

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Fiction by Antigone Kefala & Poetry by Antigone Kefala

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July 2025, no. 477

For a long time, Antigone Kefala was thought of as a migrant writer. This lens confined discussion of her work to the territory of biography and witness and obscured the migratory poetics of the writing itself. In her spare, bristling poems and candid journals, and across her non-fictional prose and fiction, Kefala’s restive work hinges on precision and vision.

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When I think of Bach, I recall powdered wigs, a dim, gilded hall, limelight burning on a stage, rouged cheeks, finely turned men’s calves in stockings. I am in the audience, I am in a box seat, I am holding a fan, but really, I am nowhere at all.

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The selected work of a long-lived poet presents the reviewer with so much to consume. A long life and career give a poet plenty of time to make their way through different styles and themes and, perhaps most importantly, to witness moments in history and shifts in culture. In this case, we have a career spanning fifty-something years and a life that ended in 2021.

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The Drop Off by David Stavanger

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June 2025, no. 476

David Stavanger’s third collection of poetry, The Drop Off, disintegrates binaries and social expectations with post-structuralist fervour, occupying and exploring the liminal space of broken families, neo-liberal cultures, mental health and, of course, language. Stavanger’s poetry is both pithy and undercutting, anathematic and loving, political and personal – and often, as is the case with such duplicitous poetry, these themes express themselves simultaneously, almost co-dependently.

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