Accessibility Tools
Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
Subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, Google, or Spotify, or search for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.
Episode #199
This week on the ABR Podcast, we continue to celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize with the second of three episodes featuring the shortlist. This week’s story is ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse. The judges had this to say about ‘M.’: ‘Wittily told, this rollicking tale set in New York City is at once a character study of the garrulous oddball M and a tragicomic portrait of the narrator herself, whose compulsions and choices see her avoiding the everyday joys of her life as a mother.’ Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize. Listen to ‘M.’, published in the August issue of ABR.
Angels are made from banksia. They are grown in Prague, are
Exported in all directions, and turn grey in air. They
Only fly in places where the ground is hard. If
You try to count them they turn into numbers. If
You try to call them they turn into names. They
Are not decorative at parties but illustrative, of Guernica, for example
It is a kind of sleep we must learn,
seasonal as spiders, our bodies
weights no web can hold.
sparrow strung up
one foot knotted
in an accidental
backyard trap