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Dan Disney

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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:

An interview with Dan Disney

by Australian Book Review •
May 2023, no. 453
Poet of the Month with Dan Disney

Dan Disney’s latest books include New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave) and accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His individual poems have won numerous prizes, including, most recently, the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Disney teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

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Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist 2023

by •
The ABR Podcast
Peter Porter

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
2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist

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

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Endings & Spacings by Pam Brown & >>> & || (accelerations and inertias) by Dan Disney

by •
January–February 2022, no. 439
Abigail Fisher reviews 'Endings & Spacings' by Pam Brown and '>>> & || (accelerations and inertias)' by Dan Disney

‘Endings & Spacings’ opens with a confession: after several decades of ‘making connections / through strings of words’, Pam Brown is no closer to answering the question, ‘what does a poet / do’? In interviews, Brown tends to describe writing poetry as a kind of ‘benign compulsion’, an engagement with the world that must be critical to be interesting but that ‘can’t answer questions any better than anything else’, as she asserted in Meanjin in 2001 and has resolutely maintained ever since. In her latest collection, Endings & Spacings, even this benign compulsion – ‘dwindling now’ – comes under threat, its benignity troubled by the resemblance between arranging lines on the page and the curation of fragments in a virtual ‘museum / of imperial plunder’.

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The 2022 Shortlist

January–February 2022, no. 439
2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist

ABR is pleased to present the shortlist for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which this year received 1,328 poems from thirty-four countries. Congratulations to those who reached the shortlist: Chris Arnold, Dan Disney, Michael Farrell, Anthony Lawrence, and Debbie Lim. Each of their poems is listed below in alphabetical order by author. For the full longlist, click here.

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2016 Porter Prize Shortlist

by •
March 2016, no. 379
Read the five Porter Prize shortlisted poems: 'Tailings' by Amanda Joy, 'Lament for "Cape" Kennedy' by Campbell Thomson, 'Rage to order' by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, '... a passing shower?' by Dan Disney, and 'Prelude to a Voice' by Anne Elvey. ... (read more)

'Exile', a new poem by Dan Disney

by •
November 2013, no. 356

I spent the first years of my life in a valley

                    sitting in woods muttering the occult business of little folktales;

                                        madness sometimes works

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and then when the by Dan Disney

by •
June 2012, no. 342
Kate Middleton reviews 'and then when the' by Dan Disney

Dan Disney’s début collection, and then when the, is a slim volume infused with irreverent outings in philosophy and place. Just as the opening poem places its speaker in a philosophy class, philosophers offer constant points of reference. Disney reformulates such well-worn dicta as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum with verve, as in the poem ‘Towards a unifying theory of non-coincidence’, in which he writes, ‘the dead / (who tick not) / murmured “we do not think; therefore we are not”’.

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'Smalltown Études', a new poem by Dan Disney

by •
April 2011, no. 330

Bairnsdale
The sky is starling-filled granite, this open country
veneered with estates sudden as dark water rising. Main Street
clusters with pensioners

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