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John Foulcher

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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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Williamson on Macfarlane

A chorus of souls: Fiona McFarlane’s discursive theodicy

by Geordie Williamson

This week on The ABR Podcast Geordie Williamson reviews Highway 13, a collection of short stories by Fiona McFarlane. Each story is concerned with murder, that ‘ultimate de-creative act’, and might be thought of as true crime, given the real-world familiarity of characters, places, plots. Geordie Williamson is a literary critic, editor and the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found. Listen to Geordie Williamson’s ‘A chorus of souls: Fiona McFarlane’s discursive theodicy’, published in the September issue of ABR.

 

 

Recent episodes:

Ragged Disclosures by Paul Hetherington & Dancing with Stephen Hawking by John Foulcher

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March 2023, no. 451
Prithvi Varatharajan reviews three new poetry collections

Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 112 pp) choreographs its prose poems carefully, which is unsurprising from the co-author and co-editor, respectively, of a scholarly book on prose poetry and Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (both 2020). His new collection employs a lyric-dramatic mode, which Fernando Pessoa described as ‘lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters’. It features a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ with a ‘shared / Australian vernacular’, in a long, glancing dialogue. These appear most direct in nine ‘Ragged Disclosures’, each comprising three square poems which are bordered and interlinked. ‘Ragged Disclosures 1’ offers a clue to the text: ‘Their ragged / intersections make an unjoined, / searching rapport.’  The poems between these seem to represent this ‘searching rapport’ through shared experience in Rome, Venice, and various other locales, with pronominal shifts to ‘I,’ ‘we’, and ‘you’.

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2019 Porter Prize Shortlist

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March 2019, no. 409

'Dancing with Stephen Hawking' by John Foulcher; 'The Mirror Hurlers' by Ross Gillett; '63 Temple Street, Mong Kok' by Belle Ling; 'Searching the Dead' by Andy Kissane; 'Raven' by Mark Tredinnick.

... (read more)

ACT | Three poems by John Foulcher

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States of Poetry Podcast - Series Two

John Foulcher reads his poems ‘The Poetry Exam’, ‘Paris Evening’, and ‘Before the Storm’ for ABR's ACT States of Poetry anthology.