Cirrus@Austlit

'Jumaana Abdu’s startling debut novel doesn’t explain Islam but explores its depths.'

'According to the UN, almost 6 million Palestinians are refugees, meaning that almost half of all Palestinians are unable to return to their homes. The violent, and ongoing, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people has become known as the Nakba—the Catastrophe—and from it are born millions of stories of movement and exile, of hope and unflagging determination.'

(Introduction)

'In Germany they joke that Slavs live in poverty so they can drive home in a Mercedes. I hadn’t heard this stereotype growing up in so-called Australia. From there, we had to fly.' (Introduction)   

'When I left Bosnia in 2018, my cousin gave me a book of poetry, Bosansko-Hercegovačka Poezija. It’s a slim volume, bright purple with a pale lilac square on its cover. From it, a woman sketched in dark blue, a wide-eyed and startled dove at her breast, stares out. It was published in 1983, and is soft with its years and the hands that have held it. I still haven’t read it. I can’t speak Bosnian. Or rather: I couldn’t. Or perhaps: I can’t speak it well enough for this. When we left Bosnia, we left the language too. I was five and naš jezik became simply: a language. Not mine. Definitely not ours.' (Introduction)

'White Clouds, Blue Rain (2021) is Oliver Driscoll’s second poetry collection, appearing a short year after his 2020 I Don’t Know How that Happened. Like his earlier work, it is concerned with the everyday: small moments of domesticity and care; conversations both mundane and profound; fleeting interactions with, but more often, observations of, an outside world whose parameters are undefined, but which nonetheless feel tightly bound, contained. To say that this is a result of the pandemic, which has certainly imbued domesticity and its imaginary with a gravitas denied to it when it was considered womanly, would be incorrect insofar as Driscoll has always had an eye for the ordinary, has always been pulled by the intimate, the close.' (Introduction)

'To read Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (2020), Elena Gomez’s second full-length poetry collection, is to be propelled headlong through the dizzy intersect of postmodernity and Marxist-feminist critique, to be flooded with possibilities for distraction, and for engagement. It is a work that not only demands rereading but requires it. Which is not to say that it cannot be drunk down along with your breakfast coffee (it’s slim enough that this is possible), but it is to say that the work is best enjoyed over a series of re-readings, with time for the ideas to settle into your insides, digest.'  (Introduction)

'For years, nobody called me by my name. In Brisbane. I was jen; in Melbourne people called me ana. It was a neat split, my name folded into a recognisable shape, the unnecessary syllables and foreign letters turned in against themselves and shushed. It is a recent thing to have claimed the full breadth of myself. Dzenana. That's what people call me now: in Bosnia, my place of birth; in Glasgow, where I'm studying; increasingly, back home in Melbourne, in Brisbane. I stopped offering the folded envelope of my identity months ago and yet still, to hear my name said aloud is a particular thrill; almost sensual, like new touch. The intimacy of it takes my breath away. I glow at its gentle syncopation, the shallow sigh of its vowels. My name is Persian for beloved. Where I am from, it identifies me : Bosniak, and : Muslims.'  (Introduction)

'Experience of mental illness presents a paradox that feels impossible for representation in language: it is at once both too personal and yet too universal for easy translation. Everyone has a measure for how it can be done; from Sylvia Plath to My Chemical Romance to Robin Williams, if we have not experienced mental illness ourselves, we have seen a multitude of others grapple with it and have become (we think) discerning arbiters of the real. For the most part, and particularly in pop culture, there seems to be two somewhat incommensurable ways to render the experience legible: earnestly or through humour. In unskilled hands, both options are rife with pitfalls.' (Introduction)