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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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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.
At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf.
Some of the ocean has tired of the incessant battering
and steals over the beach away from the refractory swell.
Mud is loath to relinquish anything –
even in the name of science –
it will do so with a belch of methane
and black cloud in water.
The instruments are called ‘loggers’
There’s no getting away from things. / There is driving, then walking miles / along a quiet coast on a rising tide – / with the back-of-the-mind consciousness / that in an hour or so the sea ...
... (read more)'And to the other men from Afghanistan,
and Iran and Iraq, who prepared a feast for me
one midday, years ago on my way to work,
laid the clean sheet smooth ...'
Sarah Day’s début collection, A Hunger to Be Less Serious (1987), married lightness of touch with depth of insight. In Towards Light & Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp, 9781925780024), Day continues this project in poems concerned with light, a thing presented as both ...
... (read more)