Accessibility Tools
Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
Subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, Google, or Spotify, or search for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.
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.
(after Samuel Beckett’s Molloy)
still. but not quite.
I drew on the right
of time.
the other way (I have this solution):
escape that hazard
circulating always.
before I began
(before the hope of circulation)
I began better.
during the remaining of my of my
of my of my
(plus one in my),
I arrive at my mind ...
In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, MTC Cronin reads 'Little Track', 'The Grass is Full', and 'The Correct Way' which feature in the 2016 QLD anthology.
... (read more)In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, MTC Cronin reads 'Above Us' and 'The World's Yard' which feature in the 2016 QLD anthology.
... (read more)after David Brooks
Red-
tailed Bedouins
of Poetry, black
cockatoos embroider
the sun into us,
seam-rip it asunder.
*
On the Fitzroy's
bank at midday,
cracking seeds of eucalypts
that outrank Council, a hundred
Banks' black cockatoos,
a paroxysm of commas.
*
With their subtler
comp ...
Woman
the real sea snoring half a mile away
the scrubbed brick walls of the double lounge and its
samples of african drums flood the speakers
Is that your shadow, weightless,
a smudge of grey dust
in the black trickery of the she-oak?
the ...
... it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
—Sylvia Plath, 'A Birthday Present'
Here's some activity you may have missed:
pompadour-lure hung three days after I
disentangle.
'It misses me.'
The fourth: A ...
Nan's budgerigar,
cat fed squeezing like the morning
fog between oxidized barbed
wire and gorse
with an older cousin
with a slug gun
booting sheep skulls
stripped by gusts, our fathers'
1950s snares swooped by plovers,
daring: 'yellow spurs! forearms
up!' shooting star-
lings for laughs
From his ebony eyrie
the moon is salubrious,
round as the white lotus' root.
The desert's his adversary.
The moon is salubrious
with his godly left eye.
The desert's his adversary,
spiteful, like a hippopotamus.
With his godly left eye
the moon is neither ossuary,
Unexpected on a day like this—
sun shuttling through the 125th Street bridge,
plastic strung in Harlem's elms like tattered wreaths:
unseasonable, unreasonable spring.
Under the red shadow of the Grant tenements
lunchtime noshers clatter china at Bettolona,
dogwalkers spread out on the grass in Sakura Park,
men from the halfway home
drag their deckchair ...
How fine it is to mutiny
against my tired mind—
say self, you are through,
to smash into a mirrorball
of echoes all scaled
in dizzying Nordic blue
feel the universe tilt
and infinitely rebuild
to flicker
like a skerrick of spindle silver
needle-quick,
and never be held—
this is the freedom
of the uni ...