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Reviewed by Mansoor Ahmed for Readers' Favorite
In Adelma, Where It Is Always Dusk by Roderick Makim is a wide-ranging collection of poetry and prose that moves between outback Australia, Southeast Asia, Antarctica, and the inner landscapes of memory, anger, and wonder. Makim grew up on a farm in the Gulf Country of Northwest Queensland, surrounded by geckos, King Browns, and the kind of silence that shapes a writer. The poems range from short, compressed meditations on movement and decay to longer, more combative pieces on AI's hollowing out of human creativity, the collapse of shared reality, and the particular exhaustion of living in a world that has abandoned nuance. The prose pieces are equally varied: a wry Kafka homage in which the narrator wakes up transformed into a slowly rotting durian fruit in a Bangkok backpacker dormitory; a quietly devastating flash fiction piece about a polar explorer left behind in a blizzard; and a long, funny, and surprisingly moving essay about drawing a dragon at age six.
Roderick Makim writes with a voice that is sharp, funny, and genuinely melancholic. The collection's pace constantly shifts between brevity and expansion, keeping you alert throughout its range. I was particularly struck by the poem on AI, which calls it the 'ugly, endless churn of content, not to supplement merely but to supplant entirely,' a line that lands with real force. The individuals glimpsed throughout, such as an old man smoking by the sea in Singaraja, the unnamed Antarctic explorer whispering her last words into a blizzard, are etched with care. The themes of creative integrity, cultural decay, and the difficulty of belonging anywhere run through every page. For readers who want a collection that earns both its tenderness and its fury, In Adelma, Where It Is Always Dusk is a must-read for them.
