This week on The ABR Podcast, Anthony Macris reviews Rachel Cusk’s fictional autobiography, Life of M, finding it ‘particularly strange and compelling’. Interrogating the uncomfortable relationship between selfhood and celebrity, Cusk’s novel questions how human identity ‘warps and buckles under pressure’. Life of M is a novel that makes an ‘enigma’ of both its narrator and its author, Macris writes: it is ‘like watching two sphinxes circle one another … guarding at all costs their essential unknowability’.

Anthony Macris is Adjunct Professor of Writing at the University of Technology Sydney. His best-selling autism memoir, When Horse Became Saw (2011), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year.

‘Sphinx and her double: A Woolfian celebration of the moment’ by Anthony Macris is published in the October issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Emma Dawson surveys Bernard Keane’s Seize the Moment, in which Keane grapples with the 2025 Australian federal election result. Australia handed the Albanese government a huge majority in that election and, Dawson writes, ‘disproved the assumptions that have underpinned Keane’s political analysis for years’. Keane presents merely a ‘well-intentioned’, ‘tinkering’ approach to policy in his book: ‘none of this is new, let alone bold, thinking’.

Emma Dawson is Executive Director of the Chifley Research Centre. She was previously a senior policy adviser in both the Rudd and Gillard governments.

‘To kill the pig: Politics that misses the moment’ by Emma Dawson is published in the October issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Cheryl Leavy reviews Julie Janson’s ‘unsettling and powerful’ poetry collection, My Kaathi Sister, calling it a brand of truth-telling that is ‘embodied, tactile, and troubling’, but ‘never performative’. Janson’s work positions the reader as ‘outcry witness’, Leavy writes, pushing them ‘to the edge of their psychological, social, and political readiness’ to hear her testimony.

Cheryl Leavy is from the Kooma and Nguri nations in western and central Queensland. She is the 2026 winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and its inaugural First Nations winner. In 2022, Cheryl was awarded the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize. She has been published by Cordite, Griffith Review, Southerly, and The Guardian.

‘Fierce ground: Laying down songline’ by Cheryl Leavy is published in the September issue of ABR.

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