‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’ by Lisa Gorton

‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’ by Lisa Gorton

This week on The ABR Podcast, Lisa Gorton reviews Tomorrow by Peter Goldsworthy. A poetic companion to Goldsworthy’s ‘expansive, thoughtful’ memoir The Cancer Finishing School, Tomorrow braids the everyday experience with the ironic, the meaningful, the terrifying: the poetry ‘charges familiar things with terror’, Gorton writes. But the strength of Goldsworthy’s poetry lies in the unexpected; in some images, Gorton points out, ‘lonely terror bends weirdly around to meet the companionship of old poems and dead friends’. Goldsworthy brings ‘a new voice’ to ‘the small hours, the long minutes’ of the insomniac’s night: ‘This time / it’s serious. // And more intimate./ A deeper kind // of itch.’ Lisa Gorton is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collection, Press Release (2007), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Here is Lisa Gorton with ‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’, published in the July issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’ by Killian Quigley

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Killian Quigley’s review of Plotting the Oceans: Stories of powerful maps and their makers by Sarah Hamylton. Hamylton’s sharp insights emerge from her deeply embodied knowledge of her environment, Quigley asserts. In an era where ‘drones, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are transforming how maps are made’, such ‘situated knowledge’ is increasingly valuable. While technological advancement is inevitable, Quigley urges a renewed ‘attention to the bodies that map – that sweat, are sunburnt and shark-nibbled’. ‘To be physically present in a place – and physically vulnerable to that place – is to know it in a way’ that remote technologies cannot. Killian Quigley is a teacher and senior researcher at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the co-editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea, published in 2019. Here is Killian Quigley with ‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’, published in the June issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’ by Maria Takolander

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature the runner-up in the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, titled ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was Lost’, by Maria Takolander. Wide-ranging and delightfully digressive, Takolander’s encyclopaedic essay uses the modest tumbleweed as a lens through which to examine Western mythology, colonial violence, environmental crises, and Tsarist Russia, among much else. ‘The tumbleweed is a celebrity, albeit a minor one’, Takolander writes. Maria Takolander was the inaugural winner of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2010. She is the author of four poetry collections and a book of short stories. Her début novel, The End of Romance, will be published by Text Publishing in June. The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twentieth year, is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. Here is Maria Takolander with ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’, published in the June issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘“One of our rarest gifts”: David Malouf in the pages of Australian Book Review’ by Carissa Chye

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Carissa Chye’s essay on David Malouf, titled ‘One of our rarest gifts’. A retrospective piece on ABR’s rich, generative relationship with Malouf, Chye’s essay recalls how Malouf’s ‘work and presence animated the literary life of the journal’. Taking us through the ABR archive, Chye observes that ‘the enduring singularity of Malouf’s literary vision is traceable through the convergent ways critics responded to the same defining impulses in his work’. Across decades of literary dialogue and imaginative essaying,’ she writes, ‘Malouf’s work was gently pedagogic of a particular mode of careful reading’. Carissa Chye is the ABR Peter Rose Editorial Cadet. Here is Carissa Chye with ‘One of our rarest gifts’: David Malouf in the pages of Australian Book Review’, published in the June issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran: Locating ourselves and each other through the voices of the vatan’ by Marjon Mossammaparast

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Marjon Mossammaparast’s essay, titled ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran’. She traces the complicated relationship of diasporic Iranians to their vatan, ‘primarily the site of belonging and memory, akin to Country’. Listening to the scattered voices of her vatan – ‘political exiles, religious refugees, the imprisoned and the smuggled, emigrants, lapsed believers, patriots, atheists, the new generation’ – drifting through various communication apps, Mossammaparast captures what it means when people ask her about the ‘situation’ in Iran.  Marjon Mossammaparast’s latest volume of poetry And to Ecstasy, published by Upswell in 2022, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Award in 2023. Her début collection, That Sight (Cordite, 2018), won the 2019 Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Mossammaparast was born in Abadan, Iran, in the year of the Islamic Revolution. Here is Marjon Mossammaparast with ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran: Locating ourselves and each other through the voices of the vatan’, published in the June issue of ABR.  See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.