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Felicity Plunkett

Dangerous Ideas about Mothers edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson

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December 2018, no. 407
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Dangerous Ideas about Mothers' edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson

An essay at the heart of this collection, ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ by Maria Tumarkin, is not as insistent as its title suggests. Tumarkin, interested in ‘fissures and de-fusion’, troubles the awkward spots in her analysis. While reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) – which places ‘motherhood and queerness side by side’ with ...

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Books of the Year 2018

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December 2018, no. 407
Books of the Year 2018

To celebrate the best books of 2018, Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser

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Writers on Writers: Ceridwen Dovey on J.M. Coetzee by by Ceridwen Dovey

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November 2018, no. 406
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'On J.M. Coetzee' by Ceridwen Dovey

To imagine this possessiveness in voyeuristic terms – something I find creepy with its note of control or ridicule – strikes me as a way to manage both the erotic charge of reading and the uncomfortable distance between the work we host in our heads (and hearts, if you imagine words, as poet Paul Celan did ...

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No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani

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October 2018, no. 405
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison' by Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani describes being smashed into the sea by the boulder-like weight of an overpacked, splintering boat transporting asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. The wreck’s ‘slashed carcass’ gashes the flailing survivors and the bodies of those who have died, and Boochani settles under a wave ...

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The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 1: 1940-1956 by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

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April 2018, no. 400
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956' edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

‘A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Yet part of the lure of letters – and life writing generally – is a sense of the corporeal, the promise of discovering the writer herself. As Jacqueline Rose suggests, writing about biography and ...

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State Editor Felicity Plunkett introduces series two of the QLD anthology

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States of Poetry Podcast - Series Two

In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, State Editor Felicity Plunkett introduces the second series of ABR's Queensland States of Poetry anthology.