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Karen Knight

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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‘Rejecting the system it created’: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations

by Rebecca Strating

This week on the ABR Podcast, we feature Rebecca Strating’s commentary ‘“Rejecting the system it created”: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations’. While the second Trump administration presents a challenge for Australian policy makers, it also provides an opportunity for Australia, explains Strating, ‘to develop greater self-reliance in foreign policy and deepen relationships across Asia’. But what are leaders across Asia concerned about and how are they responding to the Trump administration? Strating provides a survey, noting that ‘most Southeast Asian nations have so far opted for hedging strategies that maintain relationships with multiple partners’.
Rebecca Strating is Director of La Trobe Asia and was this year awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in recognition of her contributions to the fields of strategic defence and international relations. Her most recent book, Girt by Sea: Re-imagining Australia’s security, was published by Black Inc. in 2024. Here is Rebecca Strating with ‘“Rejecting the system it created”: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Karen Knight reads her poem 'Atonement' which features in the

Casualties

(Willow Court Asylum, 1827-2000, New Norfolk, Tasmania)

 

Squatting in the bitumen
by the old mortuary
suckering weeds
of blackberry.

Around the hem
of the exercise yard
runtish holly.

Under the scum and stench
of the Frescati pond
rotting water ribbons
and frogs.

An ash sapling
tunnel ...

Atonement

 

I

This clutch of buildings
has long died
but the ghosts are still here
trying to find heartbeats.

We need to lie
the mirrors down
and take a hammer
to them.

Make a mandala
out of all this
scratched
and crazed glass.

This place needs
to be blessed
before the ghosts reach

Where am I?

 

I am desperate for connection.
I must have hit a black spot.
The sun is glaring at me and blinding
my display screen.
All I can see is my own face.
Coarse sand has crept between my toes.
I have wandered too far.
I need to google a map, text someone
who will reconnect me.
This shell, this sand, the smell of rotting ...

Karen Knight lives in Hobart. She has been widely published and anthologised since the 1960s, and has written four collections of poetry. The most recent, Postcards from the Asylum (Pardalote Press, 2008), won the 2005... ... (read more)