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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.
I wonder what happens
in Seb's kitchen, I see
him round the corner
into the room, sun shining, cat
ready for food, a grin
that is mixed of resignation
& amusement eyes alight
for the opportunity
each day brings. I always
liked the way he understood
things – things I've
never understood –
as an open secret, knowledge
with w ...
someone is leaving a plane and feeling the city wrap around them again. the atmosphere, it is always heavy around here. what that means is that it's humid. within the person there is an internal battle, then there is a decision, then there is action. while the consequences of the action play out, crickets play and not even in the background. the sound rises and all of a sudden it feels like the ...
We've been in mourning just over a year,
or just under, depending on the date we're marking.
Not always celebrations, anniversaries
have a way of keeping their appointments:
they're ticked off at the level of the body
and brain, our biochemical wakes.
I've felt strange all week, sick and sleep-obsessed,
a willed agoraphobic. Show me the cave
I need to ...
Casuarina leaves disable the dog.
He halts on the track ahead, scratches,
then sits and sulks, his undercarriage
a matt of clinging tendrils.
My hands prickle with casuarina scales
so small they're almost unseen,
but my palms know they're there
and the dog does, too, his eyes accusing.
The she-oaks shouldn't have been a surprise,
but were. We came up ...
They toll hours. I trace the peak and trough of raven-call
through brick veneer walls to the hospital – an hour away –
with every throaty rattle, to my Aunt, morphine
pump filtering sleep. She's comfortable, her nurses say.
Housebound with telephone, I'm waiting, listening
for whispering oxygen, for rattle-claws on tiles,
black birds stalking roofs of this cind ...
Evening, at the edge of the reef
a ghost net snags my fishing line.
Lead-core line is made to last and often
braided round plastic craypots tumbling
from West Coast to Madagascar
to shroud the coastline over there.
I write my dead friend's name in foam,
watch a wave rush it away.
In another's name a rose adrift
surfs an off-shore rip away
ove ...
I drive in on Daylight Saving Time
with a pale, fat moon rising
over the Moresby Ranges.
New subdivision: Ocean Heights Estate?
It looks like Sandcastle Land.
Foreshore dunes
limestone-terraced into sharp ledges:
high-priced real estate
perched at weed-wreathed ocean edge
awaiting global warming.
Blowouts hiberna ...
The river has always
sat in front of me,
mud between toes
shooting down grassy
hills on cardboard. My
brother dragged a sheep
behind a canoe
to the other side,
and painted a warning
on his rose canvas
when my sister drowned.
She was throwing rocks
when swallowed.
Dog barks heard from the kitchen.
Mum ran screaming up
To read a landscape by another landscape;
Valley cloud reveals altitude.
To read the landscape visits the ego
That prevents a proper reading.
To this landscape, the circular fireplace
And a straight trunk – xanthorrhoeas present.
To read this landscape to the tune of other words,
As moisture moves us, is us, drowns us.
To read the landscape ...
Part of the river begins here, car carcasses
Filter run-off, houses fenced off
A two foot foam toy stealth bomber
Discarded in the buffalo – 'the F27C
Striker Brushless' neglected, ignored.
Broken winged, landlocked like concrete islands.
Part of the river begins here,
Sweet mud smell, the hill you slide down
On tin, the old man keen to shoot to shoo ...