“No, the new heat death from textbooks,/
rather than that intangible entropy,/
arrives – literal, not paradoxical;/
on trees, not paper; cold-blooded, not cold”
Category: Poetry & Fiction
[Poetry] — Raymond Miller
“Discovered letters she once wrote/in that unsteady girlish hand;/unsheathe each from its envelope,/ignore the cracking of his throat/for he would not be thought unmanned.”
[Poetry] — Ethan Turner
“I listen to music and I watch sports and I read books and/I’m a bystander in this world.”
[Poetry] — Michael Sutton
“Looking from the pavement into a star starved sky I slither./
The car which from distance seemed blanketed kitschly in leaves/
I soon see bashed with slate and bricks felled by night winds.”
[Essay] A Historical Fiction — Stephanie Limb
“I feel a pleasure similar to Lisa Robertson’s when I read historical fiction. Maybe Cusk is right. Maybe it is pornography; maybe that’s why I like it.”
[Poetry] — Jane Zwart
“forgetting/pushes before it, like a wave, like a broom,/the premonition of loss.”
[Essay] The ‘everlastinge Posterytie’ of Thomas Chatterton: George Rawlins’s ‘Cheapside Afterlife’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Rawlins’s powerful sonnet sequence of ‘imagined history’ is a fitting tribute to Chatterton’s forged fictions.”
[Poetry] — John Grey
“You could call this chemistry./
But I prefer geography,/rivers that flow together,/form this cozy delta.”
[Poetry] — Luigi Coppola
“The opening of the future coffin
led almost instantly to a tug
of war over tender meat”
[Fiction] Never Let Me Go, Osaka Babe Ruth — Mark Halpern
“I miss the tastes, smells and sounds of Greek restaurants. Let’s open one ourselves. Maybe a chain. Maybe we’ll get rich. For sure, we’ll be doing the people of Japan a great favour.”
[Fiction] Varii Graffiti – Michael Paul Hogan
“One night I drained off another glass, two glasses, three, and unbuttoned my trousers and urinated over a canvas of snow-layered slate, a quotation from Rimbaud
J’AI SEUL LA CLEF DE CETTE PARADE SAUVAGE”
[Fiction] Espalier’s Song — Jack Barker-Clark
“I am a fruit tree but it has not always been this way.”
[Review] The Inner Showreel: Love, anti-travel and the distillation of experience in Nick Power’s Bright Angel Proof – James McLoughlin
“Rather than the transience with which so much social media wanderlust is imbued, this collection seeks – and finds – a more permanent imprint of place, and that imprint is inevitably to be found just out of frame, where the everyday unfolds, lives are lived and all the tumult of survival rages”
[Review] The Year in Books 2021 – James McLoughlin
“As always, reading gives us the chance to escape, to imagine different worlds with exciting possibilities. Or sometimes it simply reflects the extant world back at us from an angle we have never seen ourselves. Either way, when you spend 99% of your time within the same four walls, reading is simply a way to avoid going postal.”
[Fiction] Reaping — Hannah Storm
“Now their talk is snatched sentences, words harvested by years. He wants to tell her how beautiful she is, that she should not hide as if she was ashamed of what once made her fly. She wants to tell him she has never forgotten the way he made her feel.”
[Poetry] — DS Maolalai
“a bird lands a moment/on the windowsill./makes footprints in thick/
fallen light.”
[Poetry] — William Thompson
“My father leads me through the geometry/of ploughed fields gone hard after a fortnight/of heat”
[Poetry] — Yasna Bozhkova
“Observe/the winter sea staged perfectly/in all possible hues of white”
New Critique 