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Jelena Dinic

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 ABR Podcast, Jelena Dinić pays tribute to Charles Simic, the Yugoslavian-born American poet, essayist, and translator, who died earlier this year. After her own poetry received an award in 2020, Jelena Dinić initiated a correspondence with Simic in Serbian, two writers ‘born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore’. Jelena Dinić’s writing in Serbian and English has been published in several literary journals and anthologies. Listen to ‘”Come closer and listen”: A tribute to Charles Simic (1938–2023)’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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It took me years to gather enough courage to introduce myself. Finally, deep into the Covid lockdown and a few months after receiving an award for my first collection of poems, I began my correspondence with Charles Simic by sending him an email to share the news, as if he were a family member, the one who would understand. He replied warmly, kindly, and in Serbian: ‘Draga Jelena …’

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In the Room with the She Wolf by Jelena Dinić & Beneath the Tree Line by Jane Gibian

by
April 2022, no. 441

In an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.’ Although far from improvisational, Dinić’s poetry compositionally integrates both fragility and strength as it draws together diverse experiences of war trauma, cultural displacement, the petty administrative routines of immigration departments, a Malaysian writing fellowship, Australian icons (such as the rainwater tank), folklore, and bathing in the Adriatic Sea.

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My husband has returned. A traveller whose flight was cancelled has found his way home. He slowly unpacks while I make space for the unexpected.

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Jelena Dinic reads her poem 'Alterations to the little black dress' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Jelena Dinic reads her poem 'Handbag' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Jelena Dinic reads her poem 'Babysitting' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Jelena Dinic reads her poem 'The Silence of Siskins' which features in the 2016 South Australian anthology.

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A little pin-up
three fingers
above the knees.

Behind the curtain
a dress-up game –
pretty things come undone.

He chalks lines
on raw stitches.
I catwalk.

My body fits the timeless black.
'You can live in it, or die'
smile the lips full of needles.

Do I look a little dead
with black fabric
on bone-pale flesh?

for my grandfather

 

He circles my arrival
on the calendar.

It is late November
and it doesn't snow.

A wooden pallet
hardens his bed.

He dreams of grandmother.
He doesn't want new dreams.

Two siskins in cages –
their song frozen like the air

that other November
when she lost her heart

c ...

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