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Felicity Plunkett

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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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Lake Pelosi

‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom

by Marilyn Lake

This week on The ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. The Art of Power, explains Lake, tells how Pelosi, ‘a mother of five and a housewife from California’, became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom’, published in the November issue of ABR.

 

Recent episodes:

'by the river' by Steven Herrick

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Reading Australia

by the river evokes the textures of a small Australian town in 1962 through lean episodic poems that drift along gently until moments of intensity break their banks. Through a leisurely accumulation of detail – houses on stilts, fruit bats, ...

... (read more)

The Memory Artist by Katherine Brabon

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August 2016, no. 383
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Memory Artist' by Katherine Brabon

For Pasha Ivanov, memory is 'a warped wound, with a welt or bruise that had arrived inexplicably late'. As the son of political dissidents in Moscow during Brezhnev's ...

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THE MIDNIGHT WATCH by David Dyer

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May 2016, no. 381
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Midnight Watch' by David Dyer

Two headlines, a day apart, evoke the confusion surrounding the fate of the Titanic in April 1912. New York's Evening Sun reported, 'ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION'. Twenty-four hours later, The Boston Daily Globe added: 'TITANIC SINKS, 1500 DIE.' From there, the sinking of the 'unsinkable' Titanic has been the subject of ...

State Editor's Introduction by Felicity Plunkett | States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

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States of Poetry Queensland - Series One

Prismatic and dynamic, Australian Book Review's States of Poetry anthologies are about refraction as well as brilliance, shade and trace as much as what is lit. If anthologies generate disagreement, it is because of an illusion that they set or express the fixed amidst a mobile and vibrant set of practices. The recurring, multifarious nature of States of Po ...

M Train by Patti Smith

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December 2015, no. 377
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'M Train' by Patti Smith

The writer is a conductor, opines the 'vaguely handsome, intensely laconic' cowpoke who speaks to Patti Smith as she lingers at 'the frame of a dream'. His words shape Smith's days. 'It's not so easy writing about nothing,' this companion tells her, and she scratches these words over and over onto a wall in her home with a chunk of red chalk.

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Books of the Year 2015

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December 2015, no. 377

Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines

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'Sound Bridges: A Profile of Gurrumul' by Felicity Plunkett

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June-July 2015, no. 372
In April 2011 the Australian edition of Rolling Stone featured a cover photo of Yolngu multi-instrumentalist and singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu ... ... (read more)

Book reviewing and its provocateurs: 'What single development would most improve the Australian critical culture?'

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May 2015, no. 371

Last month in Melbourne, a group of book reviewers and literary editors took part in a conference organised by Monash University’s Centre for the Book. There were more than thirty short papers, or ‘provocations’, as they were styled. Our Editor lamented the low or non-payment of some reviewers ( ...

A Short History of Richard Kline by Amanda Lohrey

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March 2015, no. 369
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'A Short History of Richard Kline' by Amanda Lohrey

A prefatory note to this striking novel tells us that it is Richard Kline’s memoir of ‘a strange event that intervened in my life at the age of forty-two’. The following ‘short history’ interleaves sections of first- and third-person narration, shuffling the pieces of a reflective Bildungsroman that charts Richard’s emergence from a vague but oppressive childhood ‘apprehension of lack’ into something even more elusive.

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Books of the Year 2014

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December 2014, no. 367

Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.

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