Peter Kenneally

It is 2050 in Melbourne. The seas have risen, full of accidental genetic mixtures and cloned versions of extinct favourites, while the land is dried out and life is a tense combination of techno-affluence, terror, and normality. This is the world the characters in Lisa Jacobson’s submarine, emotive verse novel inhabit – almost a dystopia, but not quite. The central character, North, lives a l ... (read more)

The cover of Kristin Henry’s verse novel All the Way Home shows a man at the wheel of a car, looking ahead at an endless dirt road. There is even a YouTube trailer for the book on the publisher’s website, with more driving. But in Henry’s book, as in all the best road movies, nobody ever seems to get anywhere. ... (read more)

Bronwyn Lea has chosen ‘Beginnings’ as the theme for the first issue of Poetry Australia’s new journal. The Editor has some interesting things to say about a poem’s ‘beginning’ in her Foreword, but the journal doesn’t as yet have the feel of something fresh, lively, and distinctive that a beginning promises. It is as if the title doesn’t apply to the publication as a whole. This cr ... (read more)