This week, on The ABR Podcast, Felicity Plunkett reviews Fear Less: Poetry in perilous times, by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In a cultural moment when language is often ‘weaponised to cultivate division and fear’, Smith proposes a more audacious alternative: to live otherwise, refusing to succumb to ‘hot takes and livid tirades’. Smith’s call for ‘urgent compassion’, Plunkett writes, positions poetry as a means of fostering ‘careful listening and mutual respect’. Poetry insists, Smith writes, that ‘your life must be as important to you as mine is to me’.

Felicity Plunkett is the ABR Poetry Editor and a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by the University of Queensland Press. Here is Felicity Plunkett with ‘Urgent compassion: Paying courageous attention’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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This week, on The ABR Podcast, Eleanor Spencer-Regan reflects on Melbourne poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetic career. Wallace-Crabbe made the poem ‘a space for thinking in public’, she writes. In his work, poetry is treated ‘less as statement than as real-time event: a site in which ideas are tried out rather than asserted’. His most enduring legacy, Spencer-Regan suggests, lies in the intellectual capaciousness of this approach: one that is ‘curious, plural, generous, and ever alert to contingency’.

Eleanor Spencer-Regan is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Principal of Janet-Clarke Hall, Australia’s first residential college for women. Here is Eleanor Spencer-Regan with ‘Thinking in public: The vulpine poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature a special commentary by Simon Tedeschi on writers’ festivals. At the level below headlines, writers’ festivals have in recent years undergone a more subtle but pernicious shift, he argues. Whereas they were once sites of complex dialogue and genuine exchange, now ‘both political and literary language ... functions to perform reassurance and calibration’. Tedeschi reflects on a broader ‘societal impatience with ambiguity’ and asks us to consider: ‘What specific cultural function is a writers’ festival intended to perform?’

Simon Tedeschi won the ABR Calibre Essay Prize for his essay ‘This Woman My Grandmother’, and he is the author of Fugitive (2022). Here is Simon Tedeschi with ‘“Suppose I am wrong?”: On writers’ festivals, reassurance, calibration, and risk’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Grace Roodenrys reviews they, a novel by Danish author Helle Helle. ‘The novel is a story of illness and loss but often reads as anything but,’ Roodenrys writes. There is no predominant meaning imposed on the narrative; much of its ontological poignancy stems from its small, quiet ironies. Roodenrys observes, ‘The mother is a woman who is rapidly dying. The daughter is a girl whose mother will soon be dead. Yet neither knows how to actually be these things’.

Grace Roodenrys is a writer and critic from Sydney. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Rabbit, The Saturday Paper, and elsewhere. Here is Grace Roodenrys with ‘Roads to roads: Bathos of the ordinary’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Stephen Garton’s commentary ‘When universities mattered: Higher education in a country addicted to the plough’. ‘There was a time when Australian universities mattered. Should they again?’ asks President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and former University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Stephen Garton in a feature assessing the state of knowledge production in Australia. As the government sets about creating a new body to oversee higher education, Garton says the conversation about education should extend beyond the question, ‘Are you job ready?’ Here is Stephen Garton with ‘When universities mattered: Higher education in a country addicted to the plough’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Joel Deane reviews Niki Savva’s Earthquake, an account of the 2025 Australian federal election and the role of political expediency in shaping a country. ‘Like payday loans,’ Deane writes, ‘the costs of short-term political decisions accumulate and compound’, demanding repayment. Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist, and poet. He has worked in newspapers, television, and politics in Australia and the United States. He is the co-author of Making Progress: How good policy happens, published in 2025 by Melbourne University Publishing. Here is Joel Deane with ‘Lemmings over a cliff: On political and publishing expediency’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Sara Webb investigates the heated debates and mind bending science of quantum physics. As Webb writes, the ‘universe exists on an unimaginable scale’, its physics strange but wondrous.

Sara Webb is the inaugural ABR Science Fellow and an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes (2024), was made a Superstar of STEM in 2022, and was chosen as a Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 in Science & Healthcare in 2025. She specialises in AI-driven transient astronomy, applying machine learning to large-scale survey data to uncover fast cosmic events. Here is Sara Webb with ‘A truly probabilistic universe: One hundred years of heated debate and mind-bending physics’, published in the December 2025 issue of ABR.

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This week, on The ABR Podcast, Mindy Gill reviews Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection. For Gill, Smith’s essays ‘have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts’. Dead and Alive ranges across technology and digital surveillance, authorship and literature, and the erosion of public space, among other urgent concerns. Considered together, ‘these essays reveal continuities otherwise invisible when read in isolation: a set of preoccupations that cut across ostensibly tangential subjects’.

Mindy Gill was ABR’s 2021 Rising Star. A poet, critic, and former editor-in-chief of Peril magazine, Gill is an Associate Lecturer of Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Her collection of poems, August Burns the Sky, was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Here is Mindy Gill with ‘Thought’s tempo: Essays that imagine otherwise’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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