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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.
for Marcia Langton
The rock-art guide, combusting
in 43 degrees, back to image.
His sloppy dreamtime
a melted ice-cream,
far from refrigerated sublime.
Gwion rock art from the 'Tassel era' is happy art,
though contentiously attributed and dated, he says,
authoritative white sweater in white sweater.
for Lee Harwood
Softly solarised and parallel
two lines echo each other, glow slightly,
in a space that is nowhere
#
  ...
Quick across the twilight road,
the eight legs of the cat.
Water corrects the earth
to flatness, patching fields with sky.
Little boat of red figures, adrift between two days.
The creek slides through the rain's eyelashes.
Should the unique serve to typify?
Have they been ill-used? To what purpose?
The Asian couple.
I am inclined to think Chinese –
mostly on the basis of size,
but not Japanese (the ...
I am history now
in the scales, the age of sounds
I make sense then drop it
it gets dirty, it breaks
the ants carry it
I am bent at the switch
my tapes of the archive
decay, loops stutter
glitch arias
I am bent at the floor
facts roll under the chair
little dust songs
or songs outside
the parrots know
and I am sti ...
Fitness: fact, fiction
or fantasy? – among things
meant. Parachutes
open like fuchsias,
picnic hampers
of kittens float quietly
down, as peaks
push through
resplendent mists.
Your sense
falls upward
like helium or blinds,
now it's precisely
subtitled, you realise –
as the first tentative
The do-it-yourself piano isn't
kicked to matchwood, and you take
this for affirmation. When we
work out how to switch off
Bob Dylan, your plangent homemades
will go unaccompanied, no longer
sought like an injury lost in the mists
of Hansard. People suggest topics
they won't be using, and this is
more like an archive sneeze
than what yesteryea ...
1.
Angling over star-fields,
the pitches lit like billiard tables.
Those lengths you were shouted up and back,
lungs scoured by brillo air.
The lazier concord of close mown grass
and low hanging fruit
of the short boundary. A tang of primitive
electronics: the circuit board's braille labyrinth,
the slab type of Amstrad.
This callow path, you< ...
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 ...