Two new books to help you feel better about the world

POETRY
Love: Stories, poems and essays
Edited by Shirley Le
Sweatshop Literacy Movement, $24.95

Two Tongues
Maria van Neerven
UQP, $24.99

Love is the 15thbook released by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, an outfit based in western Sydney with the remit to champion writers of CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) and First Nations backgrounds, and the 35 contributors to this anthology are a polyphonic sweep of voices. There are writers who hail from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as Indigenous authors.

With the world seemingly burning in all corners, it feels like the necessary corrective is to present a collection that explores and celebrates love in all its guises and permutations. Despite the subheading, the book has more stories mined from lived experience than either poems or essays – which is a bit of a pity. It would have been great to have a more even spread of contributions across the board. Nonetheless, what we do have are submissions that roam restlessly in their interrogations of what it means to love and be loved.

Editor Shirley Le encouraged her writers to look beyond stirrings of romance, but many of the offerings examine affairs of the heart, even if sometimes Cupid’s arrow fails to land. Heterosexual crushes and queer couplings are considered, but there are also tales about generational and ancestral respect, love grounded in place, love to be found in solidarity and resistance, and a non-verbal expressive form of communication.

From Free Palestine rallies in cities to Queensland sugarcane country, from online fanfic camaraderie to the tumult and domestics in housing commission neighbourhoods, love lurks in all nooks and fissures. Several stories also focus on self-realisation, the pitting of individual ambition and identity against societal and familial pressures.

Some of the short fiction pieces read like excerpts from larger pieces of work in progress rather than self-contained units, but wanting to know more about the characters after their story trails off abruptly isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

That there is a youthful, earnest, Sydney-based flavour to the book isn’t surprising either, given the origins of Sweatshop, and although several writers are already published (including Natalia Figueroa Barroso and Daniel Mour), the majority are emerging. Love gives them the opportunity to find their voice and flex their creative muscles; it’s a generous, expansive theme that lends itself well to a multitude of interpretation.

The importance of having your voice heard is also a refrain in Maria van Neerven’s debut poetry book, Two Tongues. Divided into three sections, the book as a whole reflects on the lasting effects of colonialism on van Neerven and her forebears, but also reclaims Indigenous culture and reshapes the narrative into one that’s defiant and proud.

Despite the heaviness of some of the content, van Neerven’s poetry is playful, with erasure, found text, fragments, doodles and zigzag and landscape page layouts incorporated into her words. Metaphorically it feels as though these experimental riffs are a way for the poet to address the jagged messiness of growing up, unsure of how you see yourself when the world is determined to categorise you in a predetermined box. Perhaps these inventive flourishes suggest one should not accept the tyranny of structural normality and strike out on one’s own terms.

Shifting through her memories chronologically from childhood to adulthood, the poet from the Yugambeh nation may tackle the legacy of trauma and shame (“outside of our neutral word, we became blak and poor” and “this pandemic of racism”) but there are also poems about the yearning for one’s own language, about the Voice referendum, motherhood, and the strength of Indigenous women, whose experiences van Neerven seeks to honour and bring to light.

It’s this tenacious love of family and community that prevails and offers a reckoning to the hurts and injustices in Two Tongues – a dual examination of both harm and balm.

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