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Ali Alizadeh

Ali Alizadeh is Poet of the Month

Australian Book Review
Friday, 20 March 2020

In the first review of my poetry, I discovered that my writing was ‘headache-inducing’ and ‘best avoided’. I was pleased that my book had at least caused a headache for that sinister reviewer! Over the years, though, even hysterically negative reviews – and, boy, do I attract them! – don’t excite or bother me too much. The best thing I’ve got from a review is knowing that there are readers who pay attention to a book’s composition, to the labour that I’ve put into producing the thing.

... (read more)
Published in April 2020, no. 420

According to one of Karl Marx’s most quoted formulations, history always repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. One may see the famous – and, of course, infamous – nineteenth-century German radical according to his own schema. We may imagine the severe, thickly bearded ...

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The many gaps in the verifiable history of Jeanne d’Arc’s early years in rural France, as well as her improbable rise to prominence and martyrdom, have left room for a considerable amount of speculation and projection over the centuries. There is no shortage of fictional or historical accounts of her life, or ways of characterising ...

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Published in October 2017, no. 395
In this episode of 'Poem of the Week' Ali Alizadeh reads 'I ♥ (this) Life?'. ABR Editor, Peter Rose, introduces Ali who then reads and discusses his poem. ... (read more)
Published in Poem of the Week

'You', a new poem by Ali Alizadeh

Ali Alizadeh
Sunday, 19 January 2014

You walked with me

that day, or night, I wasn’t walking
perhaps, maybe I wasn’t me

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Published in February 2014, no. 358

Jay Daniel Thompson reviews 'Transactions' by Ali Alizadeh

Jay Daniel Thompson
Thursday, 27 June 2013

Transactions opens with a scene of duplicity and murder. In the following pages, Ali Alizadeh plunges readers into a ‘whirlpool of greed and apathy’. The collection revolves around an assortment of men and women from different parts of the world. We encounter Anna Heinesen, a Danish charity founder who is revealed to be a sex trafficker and religious zealot; Samia, a rich and racist Emirati student who surfs cyberspace under the alias ‘The Alchemist’; Karina, a Ukrainian sex worker who winds up doing a B-grade horror film in Australia; and a nameless Iranian refugee who criticises ‘pampered Westerners’, but who has sinister secrets of his own. The lives of these characters intersect in unpredictable ways.

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Gig Ryan reviews 'Ashes in the Air' by Ali Alizadeh

Gig Ryan
Saturday, 26 March 2011

Poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh’s third book of poetry, Ashes in the Air, reclaims some themes from his earlier poetry collection, Eyes in Times of War (2006). Autobiographical sequences once again interweave with accounts of recent wars and oppression. Alizadeh also explores some ...

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Published in April 2011, no. 330