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Chris Andrews

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Neil Thomas

The red thread: Xi Jinping’s ideology of power

by Neil Thomas

This week on The ABR Podcast, Neil Thomas reviews On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the world by Kevin Rudd. Thomas explains that even China watchers find it hard to be clear on the thoughts and plans of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. They disagree, he tells us, on basic, critical questions, such as for how long Xi will rule. ‘Enter Kevin Rudd’, Thomas writes. ‘In his latest book, former prime minister Kevin Rudd adds a worthy new chapter to his life of public service, digesting thousands of pages of “Xi Jinping Thought” so that you do not have to’. Neil Thomas is a Fellow on Chinese Politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in Washington DC. Here is Neil Thomas with 'The red thread: Xi Jinping's ideology of power' by Neil Thomas, published in the December issue of ABR.

 

Recent episodes:


In this week’s Podcast we’re delighted to present the five poems shortlisted in the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. This happily alliterative prize was created in 2005 and renamed in 2011, the year after the great poet’s death. Peter Rose introduces our far-flung quintet, who then introduce and read their poems. Further details and illuminating comments on the individual poems by the judges can be found here. We hope you enjoy these wonderful poems. It’s a great way to get to know them before the prize ceremony on Thursday, 19 January.

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The 2023 Shortlist

by Australian Book Review
January-February 2023, no. 450

Read the five shortlisted poems for ABR's 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

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Melodrome by Marcelo Cohen, translated by Chris Andrews

by
November 2018, no. 406

‘I didn’t realise I was becoming untranslatable,’ Marcelo Cohen confessed after the publication of his eleventh novel, in an interview with Argentine newspaper Clarín. ‘And when I did realise, it was already too late.’ Given that Cohen is himself a renowned translator – the list of authors he has translated into Spanish ...

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Lime Green Chair, which is Chris Andrews’s second book, won in manuscript form the Anthony Hecht 2011 Poetry Prize. Andrews is also a prize-winning translator from the Spanish of Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, and others. Lime Green Chair translates and transforms everyday moments into auguries of time disappearing. Each of these mostly 21-line poems is finely patterned with unexpected rhyme and vowels that ring into a following line, as if directed by some hidden constraint: ‘Sounds that came into the world in my lifetime / already sound old-fangled: dial-up modems, / the implosion of a television tube / in a set dropped from a high window ...’ (‘Sonic Age’). 

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If between one footfall and the next, the wind
can swivel and issue empty threats of rain,
for all we know this could be one of those days,
unpinpointable even in retrospect,
when a dimly held belief begins to melt,
say the belief that it’s somehow generous
to assume that everyone’s rather like you.
An open-ended day promising nothing,
but just as full of zipjams, language splashes
and thixotropic flows, lost somewhere between
the day you realised you wouldn’t always
have to pretend to be interested in X
(opera, hot cars, Buffy Summers, poetry)

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