AustLit

'The work ranges wider than this terrorist event, gathering within its orbit other facets of the "war on terror" that include a 2015 ISIS suicide bombing and the 2005 Cronulla Riots that pitted Caucasian Australians against largely Lebanese immigrants, thus placing issues of domestic and racial violence against a broader backdrop of global unrest. There is also a set of Twitter excerpts from a now-defunct account by Jake Bilardi, an eighteen-year-old Melbourne man who converted to radical Islam and died in a suicide bombing in Iraq, March 2015. ("Graffiti Triptych," 26) Also, The ocean cliff's buoyant wind wantons goose-bumped skin ("Something is Lost," 46) The often lush imagery points toward the realm of wonder and divine, of fertility and the chance for change, countering the violence, racism, and sexism that threads through much of the content.' (Publication abstract)