Prithvi Varatharajan
Prithvi Varatharajan is a poet, essayist, and sometimes literary audio producer who lives in Melbourne. His début collection of poems and prose, Entries, was published in 2020 by Cordite Books. He has had poetry published widely in Australian journals, and his essays have featured in such publications as the Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Adaptation, Cultural Studies Review, and Peril. Prithvi holds an interdisciplinary PhD on ABC Radio National’s Poetica, and was a recipient of a 2020 Emerging Critics Fellowship at the Sydney Review of Books.
Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 112 pp) choreographs its prose poems carefully, which is unsurprising from the co-author and co-editor, respectively, of a scholarly book on prose poetry and Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (both 2020). His new collection employs a lyric-dramatic mode, which Fernando Pessoa described as ‘lyric poetry put into the mouths ... (read more)
Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) was an interdisciplinary thinker who helped establish the field of the environmental humanities (or ecological humanities); in 2012 she also co-founded the scholarly journal Environmental Humanities. Having initially trained in anthropology, Rose strove to push that field and other ethnographic studies beyond their stubborn anthropocentrism. She came to Australia in ... (read more)
The first poem in Angela Gardner’s 2007 début collection, Parts of Speech, impressed me with its emotional power. I found the subsequent poems less driven but, at the same time, animated by an unusual poetic style. Gardner is a visual artist as well as a poet, and these practices seem interrelated. Her new book, Views of the Hudson, affirms my first impression of her style: her poetry is a ... (read more)
There is a moment of reflexivity in Evelyn Araluen’s diary poem ‘Breath’, in which the poet, thousands of kilometres away, follows news reports of bushfires ravaging Australia, including the Dharug Country where she grew up. ‘I’ve started a book which seeks to tease the icons of Australiana that have been so volatile to this country. They, too, are burning,’ she writes. Several reviewe ... (read more)