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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #185
This week on the ABR Podcast we review a profile of opposition leader Peter Dutton. Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics by Lech Blaine is the ninety-third issue of the BlackInc Quarterly Essay. In his review of Bad Cop, political biographer Patrick Mullins begins by comparing Dutton to another cop-turned-politician in Bill Hayden. Listen to Patrick Mullins with ‘”Some grotesque Minotaur”: Peter Dutton’s aggressive formation’, published in the May issue of ABR.
Then, there were spires in every landscape
Tall, tapering fingers pressed together,
The supplications of early sainthood –
Those that the early painters made
To teach the unlettered, while the spires
Called them to listen and to pray.
A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –
Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;
a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap
closes another deluded seeker of asylum
behind barbed wire; civil liberties
are spooked by terror; girl children
trafficked to sexual servitude –
and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,
the great-grandmother of my children
dead in another camp, another winter, another story,
can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –
although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart
is dry as yesterday’s crusts.
... (read more)By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint
somehow survives. This Sunday morning
a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,
and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.
... (read more)Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations
jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow
my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened
as I am not by a lost country.
... (read more)He meets a man with an icicle voice
who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’
to act impulsively; this man elevates
‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships
at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar
(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,
at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –
which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed
pickled brain, in a jar).
... (read more)Today in Castlereagh Street I
Felt short of breath, and here is why.
Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh
In the clear blue shallows.
Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter —
when life says shut
the most you could muster
moments on a lake
pooled passive
or close enough and whispering
the past and only glory
Down sandstone steps to the jetty; always
the same water, lights scattered across the tide.
Remember we say, the first time.
Our eyes locked into endless permission;
this dark gift; why can’t I let go
and be the man in your life, not the one who writes
your name down for the dedication page;
whatever the name, you know who I write for;