‘Between reality and dreams’ by Sahar Rabah

‘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.

‘One bad day: Meditations on commodified flesh’ by Katherine Wilson

This week on The ABR Podcast, Katherine Wilson reviews ‘Fed Up: A chef’s adventures in food, farming and feminism’ by Lucy Ridge. Partially a memoir of Ridge’s disillusionment with a food industry that regards food as ‘little more than vehicles for profit’, the book also seeks to situate itself in conversation with feminist food scholarship. Its strengths, Wilson argues, are sensorial and experiential – vividly immersing the reader in the cultural details of bushfood foraging, for example – but Fed Up requires more exacting research and critical depth to truly trouble the field of studies it wishes to join. Ultimately, Ridge’s brand of feminism ‘narrows the scope for radical collective visions of change’, Wilson writes. Katherine Wilson is an award-winning writer, journalist, and former co-editor of Overland, whose work focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. Her essays have appeared in Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Law Institute Journal, and Eureka Street. ‘One bad day: Meditations on commodified flesh’ by Katherine Wilson is published in the upcoming June issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘Too human: Shame, horror, aversion’ by Kevin Hart

This week on The ABR Podcast, Kevin Hart reviews Turning Away: The poetics of an ancient gesture by Benjamin Saltzman. Saltzman examines our instinct to ‘turn away, whenever we are faced with death, grief, helplessness, loss, and pain’. He traces the representation of this elemental human gesture from literary classics and ancient artwork to modern films, plays, and narratives. Hart notes that Saltzman’s book is ‘a study not only of aversion but of transformation’. But what is the ethical implication of turning away in a ‘world of violence, pain, and grief’? ‘This is more than flinching’, Hart writes, ‘it is a reaction of horror mixed with shame.’ Kevin Hart is the Jo Wright University Distinguished Professor at Duke Divinity School. His most recent poetry collections are Carnets, published in 2025 by Cascade Press, and Firefly, just published by Pitt St Poetry in Sydney. Here is Kevin Hart with ‘Too human: Shame, horror, aversion’, published in the May issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘Between reality and dreams’ by Sahar Rabah

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Sahar Rabah’s winning essay from the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, ‘Beyond reality and dreams’. The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twentieth year, is one of the world’s leading prizes for an original essay in English. Rabah, who grew up in Gaza and left late last year, takes us behind the livestreamed mass destruction in Gaza to the ‘small, undeclared wars’ that are ‘not shown on television’. Moving between the speaker’s broken dreams, her nightmares, and her intimate, lived trauma, ‘Between reality and dreams’ bears powerful witness to the human cost of conflict in Gaza. Sahar Rabah writes poetry, essays, and short fiction in Arabic and English. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, LitHub, and The Markaz Review. Here is Sahar Rabah with ‘Beyond reality and dreams’, published in the May issue of ABR.   See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘Again and again: More poem than memoir’ by Jane Gleeson-White

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Jane Gleeson-White reviews Erin Vincent’s memoir Fourteen Ways of Looking. Vincent’s parents were killed suddenly in an accident when she was fourteen, and the number would go on to shape and govern the narrative of her new memoir. Commenting on the strikingly poetic form of Fourteen Ways of Looking, Gleeson-White notes that ‘the structure and arrangement of the text are key’, reflecting the fragmented nature of trauma. ‘This is narrative stripped to its barest bones,’ she writes, ‘more poem than memoir.’  Jane Gleeson-White is the author of four books, including Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice created modern finance, published in 2011, and its sequel, Six Capitals: Capitalism, climate change and accounting, published in 2014. Here is Jane Gleeson-White with ‘Again and again: More poem than memoir’, published in the May issue of ABR [index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=32510:jane-gleeson-white-reviews-fourteen-ways-of-looking-by-erin-vincent&catid=1637:may-2026-no-486&Itemid=416].  See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.