This week on The ABR Podcast, Cheryl Leavy reviews Julie Janson’s ‘unsettling and powerful’ poetry collection, My Kaathi Sister, calling it a brand of truth-telling that is ‘embodied, tactile, and troubling’, but ‘never performative’. Janson’s work positions the reader as ‘outcry witness’, Leavy writes, pushing them ‘to the edge of their psychological, social, and political readiness’ to hear her testimony.

Cheryl Leavy is from the Kooma and Nguri nations in western and central Queensland. She is the 2026 winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and its inaugural First Nations winner. In 2022, Cheryl was awarded the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize. She has been published by Cordite, Griffith Review, Southerly, and The Guardian.

‘Fierce ground: Laying down songline’ by Cheryl Leavy is published in the September issue of ABR.