Anupama Pilbrow’s debut collection opens with ‘The Body Poem’, which details a forbidden affair between a lover and ‘the body’. The lover is enamoured by ‘the body’, the lover accepts ‘the body’ and even appreciates ‘the sound it makes like / jangling keys’. The subject of the poem is never degraded, used or objectified. Pilbrow instead wraps ‘the body’ in a protective ‘gauze’ (instead of gaze?) which ‘sways in the breeze’.

Australian letters is like a microcosm of Australia itself: culturally diverse, politically varied across different states, tense and conflicted or humorous or affecting in turn. If there is one thing we may say about our literatures it is that there is a common thread of darkness underneath. Whether that thread references an unvoiced violence or subsumed toxic masculinities, or a wilfully forgotten colonial past, it is traceable in much of our writing, especially in the short story form.