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Sue Hall Pyke

Writing and reading

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  • kitten kittens kit (2026)
  • Chook Talk (2026)
  • Claire Thomas. 2026. On Not Climbing Mountains (Hachette)
  • Evelyn Araluen. 2025. The Rot (University of Queensland Press)
  • Sarah Haddad. 2024. The Sunbird (Doubledown)

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  • About
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Author: Sue Hall Pyke

Writer, dreamer, co-learner

Helen Garner 2025 The Season (Text)

Mixed feelings when it comes to this book, but the love of footy reads true. I play the edges. Kick to kick is easy, marks up is a battle and British Bulldogs is beyond me. One real game and I was done.

Cover detail

Posted on June 5, 2025September 5, 2025Categories Readings

Alexis Pauline Gumbs 2020 Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press)

Words blurring you, me and us, inviting toothy listening (123). ’Praisesong for the menopausal planet’ in each line (125). ‘Mother walruses know their babies best by touching them with their whiskers. They don’t depend on their eyes. They trust intimate vibration.’ (97).

Cover detail

Posted on June 2, 2025September 5, 2025Categories Readings

Yasmin Zaher 2025 The Coin (Catapult)

A twist in the back, cut-throat sharp excisions, all the way to the ‘wilderness suicide’, the world in a room and ‘you’ are there, deep in the layers (206). This book cannot be scrubbed off, no matter how much coin you carry.

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Posted on May 28, 2025September 5, 2025Categories Readings

Nardi Simpson 2021 The Song of the Crocodile (Hachette)

The opening pages of this river of a book float you into a place you know/don’t know. A siren song that reads like a bedtime story until you realise you’re spooked out at a campfire with no light back to the house.

Cover detail

Posted on April 15, 2025September 5, 2025Categories Readings

Yael van der Wouden 2024 The Safe Keep (Simon & Schuster)

A triangular love story with angles like arrows. Two women, deeply injured, a fully furnished home. History, family, justice. Occupation, incursion, intimacy. This by a writer who refused books when younger, ‘staring blankly at the first page … vividly daydreaming about flying.’

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Posted on March 15, 2025September 5, 2025Categories Readings

Choosing Snakes: Towards Unhampered Hospitality (2025)

A few years ago, a human neighbour picked me a handful of beans from her garden. She lived not far up the road from where I am writing this. It was a warm day and my first visit to her home. Her …

Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Shattering Orders, edited by Paula Acari, Routledge.

Posted on March 15, 2025March 15, 2025Categories Writings

Anne-Marie Te Whiu (editor) 2024 Woven (Magabala Books)

Not easy reading, this efflorescence, different voices ranging out together, holding each other, becoming truth together, calling for justice, urging towards joy, surging towards transformation. A glorious grounding. Local, right across the world, held in this basket that ‘grows and evolves’ (1).

Cover detail

Posted on February 14, 2025September 5, 2025Categories Readings

sky moments ground-dwellers tell (2025)

dad nods and we stop laughing

mum’s big story verified

no clouds up the hill new moon

this is Djargurd Wurrung land

bright like a lightbulb due north

next Sunday lunch what is that

window reflection but wait

that shape’s not a

.

Cordite 4 February. Image detail of cover by Henry Lai-Pyne

Posted on February 4, 2025March 15, 2025Categories Writings

bell hooks 1994 Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge)

When everyone is teaching, everyone is learning. Laughter a marker of change. Unpredictability, contingency, all the mystery of what happens to create a class. A windowless room, , the save found sitting in a circle. Food creating shared tables. Listening for every voice.

Cover detail

Posted on January 26, 2025March 15, 2025Categories Readings

Jumaana Abdu 2024 Translations (Vintage Books)


Deep faith. Souls ‘drawn together the way they were in the life before life’ (116). The fight against the ‘proliferating, evolving whisper of instability’ , that ‘constant threat’ to women (218). The ‘sanctity’ in privacy (269). Love as an ‘unsubstantiated recognition’ (292).

Cover detail

Posted on November 26, 2024November 26, 2024Categories Readings

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