Mini-Review

Experimental, punchy poems by Bundjalung writer Evelyn Araluen. This collection won the 2022 Stella Award.

Favourite poems:

• ‘The Ghost Gum Sequence’ p.4 – prose fragment about colonisation, terra nullius, the Stolen Generations and resilience
• ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal’ p.8 – poem about language and place
• ‘Pyro’ p.14 – all caps poem about drought, fire, sustainability & Indigenous land management
• ‘Dropbear Poetics’ p.21 – angry poem about non-Indigenous writers appropriating Aboriginal imagery
• ‘The Last Endeavour’ p.23 – prose fragment about Captain Cook’s voyage to map the transit of Venus and map the great southern land
• ‘Acknowledgement of Cuntery’ p. 30 – satirical poem about white hypocrisy/lip service to Indigenous land
• ‘To the Poets’ p.36 – critical poem about white cultural appropriation of Indigenous language, landscape and country
• ‘Concessions’ p.40 – prose poem about memories of childhood home
• ‘The Inevitable Pandemic Poem’ p.64 – a playful poem about lockdown
• ‘Unreckoning’ p.91 – an imagining of precolonial Australia as still existing as a ghost or simultaneously/in an alternate universe with current Australia
• ‘For Power For Prayer For Promise For Peace’ p.92 – a powerful BLM protest poem.

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