“Lit from the viewer’s direction, the painting invents a singular viewpoint and even predicts the camera flash, freezing the image against ‘time’s relentless melt’, as in Susan Sontag’s evocative phrase.”
[Fiction] ‘Affirmation’ — Annabel Banks
“My clients are wealthy—that goes without saying—but that’s all they have in common, so I must acrobat my way through each conversation, with not a moment’s hesitation as we leap and roll.”
[Poetry] ‘Dream Job’ — Mary Peelen
“Disrupting the dream, a holy terror: an alarm clock rings and I’m jolted back to the taupe world,/back to my day job, where, wholly unencumbered by spiritual dignity, I work myself to death.”
[Essay] Too Close to The Sun: How the creative industry fails mental health — Jack Williams
“As a society, we need to stop romanticizing the relationship between mental health and creativity.”
[Essay] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and the ‘Veil of Race’ — Tia Byer
“For Du Bois, the abolition of slavery may have freed black people from bondage, but the Reconstruction era that followed served only to disempower black people and perpetuate racial conflict.”
[Essay] Describing the Surface: David Foster Wallace and Postcritical Reading — Nathan Moreau
“David Foster Wallace fucked his students, fucked his audience, fucked his reader. David Foster Wallace abused women.”
[Poetry] ‘Tradition’ — S.T. Brant
“Every garden graveyards in a season. Take Eden.”
[Essay] On Prefaces in Kant, Hegel & Nietzsche — Josh Mcloughlin
“Prefaces in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche construct ‘a sense of time’, a conception of the history of philosophy unfolding in the dyadic interplay of crisis and critique, in order to both ‘indicate’ and ‘intensif[y] the end of an epoch’”.
[Poetry] — Louis Glazzard
“There was a truce between you and him/when the unbidden noon hurried in”
[Poetry] — Bernard Pearson
“Between the river/And the remains/I watch as my wife and son/Do the grave chores,/Remove the recidivist,/weeds pressing their suit/Around the marble”
[Fiction] — Margo Berdeshevsky
“I light one, and toss it under the slide.”
[Review] Dhaka Art Summit 2020 — Jonathan Webster
“Dhaka Art Summit seeks to generate multiple international centres in a globalised art world, built from the rich, yet often ignored (or worse co-opted) art histories outside the canonical Western traditions.”
[Poetry] ‘Nude, in a Bathroom’ — Aditya Shankar
“A nudity that isn’t an apostolic pendulum/swinging between pleasure and sin.”
[Fiction] ‘Tourists’ — Mark Halpern
“At breakfast, Henry thought he should discuss fatherly matters, but didn’t know which or how.”
[Poetry] — R.A. Allen
“I find him a collectable specimen / for my ongoing study / of longing.”
[Fiction] Passing Through — Ronan O’Shea
“Now, sat in the café, I forgot the general rundown feeling that had nagged at me all morning, and I wanted to stay; happy and nostalgic, with Marcus.”
[Review] The Brown Anthology edited by Sofia Amina — Daunish Negargar
“This anthology is refreshing in its boldness and authenticity, particularly at a time when major publishing houses are tripping over themselves to make promises on Twitter to ‘do better’ in highlighting more authors of colour.”
[Fiction] In the wish factory — Joanna Kaye
“The caretaker sees the world through its wishes; he feels the passage of time this way, he hears the people’s pain, he smells the glacial pace of change.”
