CONTRIBUTORS

Emily Bitto

Emily Bitto lives in Melbourne, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne and Victoria University. Her poetry has appeared in Meanjin, Island, Heat, the Australian Literary Review and the Sydney Morning Herald. Her debut novel, The Strays, was shortlisted for the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and was published by Affirm Press in May 2014.

Emily Bitto Reviews Judith Beveridge

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Emily Bitto

In her 1996 collection, Accidental Grace, Judith Beveridge published a series of six poems entitled ‘The Buddha Cycle’. The poems in ‘The Buddha Cycle’ are each spoken by individuals, predominantly low in the caste system, who look to the Buddha for some hope or guidance. This marked the beginning of what has be-come, for Beveridge, an enduring interest in the Buddha and Buddhist history, a subject she has approached from a number of shifting perspectives.

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Review Short: Melinda Bufton’s Girlery

Posted on July 4, 2014 by Emily Bitto

The title of Melinda Bufton’s debut collection, Girlery, asks be read ironically, but is in fact quite apt, bringing to mind a repository of all that is ‘girly,’ in the same way that a reliquary houses relics. Alternatively, it could be a verb: something close to a feminine form of tomfoolery. One imagines a stern injunction to ‘cease this girlery at once!’ With titles such as ‘Dealbreaker,’ ‘Bumper Book for Girls,’ ‘Lollyshop’ and ‘I will call you smitten because it suits your crazy eyes’ among the twenty-three poems collected here, both these associations are appropriate.

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