Landfall Review Online

Breathing Out, Breathing In

March 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Renee Liang

All of Us by Adrienne Jansen and Carina Gallegos (Landing Press, 2018), 76pp., $22; More of Us edited by Adrienne Jansen, Clare Arnot, Danushka Devindra and Wesley Hollis (Landing Press, 2019), 92pp., $22

Writing migrant stories can turn into a perilous crossing. How do you empower without assuming? How do you give voice to people who have been taught by experience to stay silent? How do you know you are pulling out their real thoughts and not just something they think you should hear? And what are the implications of asking them to write in a language they are just learning to use? [Read more…]

Twinned Roots

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Nina Mingya Powles

All Who Live on Islands by Rose Lu (Victoria University Press, 2020), 240 pp., $30

All Who Live on Islands won the 2018 Modern Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, and is the latest in a string of excellent creative nonfiction books published by Victoria University Press. Lu’s essays explore numerous subjects including her rural Whanganui childhood, teenage sex, travel and working in the tech industry. Her writing is at once tender and incisive, detailed and expansive, heated and brilliantly funny. [Read more…]

Scents and Sensibility

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Heritage

Scented by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Random House, 2019), 256 pp., $38

This pukapuka made me feel really hard done by. The core premise of Laurence Fearnley’s novel Scented is that the smellscape of the world we live in is as rich, complex and omnipresent as that which we experience by any other sense. I kept stopping to sniff the air while reading and could rarely smell anything at all – let alone analyse the different layers, tones and ingredients of scent. I started to feel that either I was lacking, or was being duped. [Read more…]

A Wellspring

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Emer Lyons

Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand women’s poetry by Paula Green (Massey University Press, 2019), 572 pp., $45

Intergenerational conceptions of poetry, conveyed through the voices of my lesbian foremothers, are paramount to my existence. Historical definitions of the poetic gather and coalesce into my own ability to write within the space my foremothers have cleared for me. Not just lesbian women poets, but all women poets have contributed to this clearing. [Read more…]

An Enhanced Reality

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Stephanie Johnson

Waterline by Chris Else (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2019), 311 pp., $34.99

Chris Else’s new novel fits neatly into the zeitgeist of current speculative fiction. Around the world, not surprisingly, writers are meditating on the environmental ruin of our planet, the precariousness of our personal freedoms, the perilous health of democracies and the encroaching all-powerful reach of corporate-owned artificial intelligence. From these depressing influences spring story after story of not too distant imagined futures. In some cases, such as in Ian McEwan’s recent Machines Like Me, the chronological setting is in the past but presents us with an alternative history – i.e. fiction that speculates on how life might have been had certain major technological advances and/or catastrophes taken place earlier. [Read more…]