Lucas Smith

A new poetry press in Australia should always be greeted with joy, and then interrogated with rigour. These six volumes from the recently created book arm of Cordite Poetry Review, the online juggernaut that churns the great substrate of AusPo like a sea cucumber on the ocean floor, represent the biodiversity and recombinant flow of new work in these interesting times. ... (read more)

Two doors, two characters, two colours – black and white – produce a surfeit of grey in John Hughes's short allegorical novel Asylum. Featuring a variety of forms, including manuals for the officials of the regime, personal letters, political tracts, and an inverted retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden in which fully clothed Adam and Eve arrive by boat and God removes their clothes in ... (read more)

The unnamed, eleven-year-old narrator protagonist of The Cartographer has an epileptic fit after witnessing a horrific rape-murder. The year is 1959. His father has just left the family days after his identical twin brother was killed by faulty playground equipment. The child’s closest friend is his wheeler-dealer grandfather, but it is in his own head that he thrives. To act out his grief he in ... (read more)