“At these minor garden parties,/Wind lushes and lashes/Through tended-to bush/Gusts across tennis courts (the nets slap/And billow); Ford Fiestas at the perimeter/Unmoved by all of this.”
[Review] 06C33 by Sofia Amina — Josh Mcloughlin
“The weight of ancestry and history press down on Amina’s reflections as she carries, quarries, and questions the burden of cultural inheritance: ‘Where does my history begin?’”
[Essay] TV Bra for Living Sculpture With(out) Charlotte Moorman — Eloise Crist
“As TV Bra is a record of Moorman’s corporeality, its reception without Moorman is burdened by the complications of mourning.”
[Poetry] — Maia Joy
“The brightness melts my insides/into something that more resembles/a Salvador Dalí painting than/anything earthly”
[Fiction] In Search of Blue — David Roberts
“Past the hospital, through once grand streets. A short walk across almost waste ground to get to that place where the machines slept their clockwork dreams.”
[Essay] Once Again, the Western — Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
“White male anxiety about an impending age where his place is not solidified is nothing new. We know this story too well, yet on screen white men go on killing, their violent delights our supposed entertainment.”
[Poetry] — Phillip Shabazz
“Someone/who loses himself for the damp word of promise/where smoke rolls upward from a Pall Mall.”
[Essay] Coming Out in Lockdown — Dominic Brown
“After more than a decade constructing this image, why come out now?”
[Poetry] — George Rawlins
“I stalk a weakening current, a mirror/to wandering, tracing faint verse/into sediment just/below whitewater.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2020 — James McLoughlin
“In need of some levity, I ran my finger along the spines on the shelf and, naturally, plucked out Heart of Darkness.”
[Essay] Dickens’s Spirits — James Riding
“These ghosts keep returning in Dickens’s writing not just because of their practical uses, but also out of necessity: they are an intrinsic component of his craft. Dickens knew all too well that a writer must be a bodysnatcher.”
[Fiction] Rare Old Primate — Brent Crane
“At the time of the heist, the lemur was thirty-two years old.”
[Essay] Boris the Katechon — Josh Mcloughlin
“Johnson, like the archetypal Pauline katechon, has been outmatched and overwhelmed by a crisis he has proved damningly incapable and incompetent to restrain, and which will further darken his already wretched political legacy.”
[Poetry] — Adam Houle
“You can’t tell / if the snow is fresh, a god-sent snow, falling / or if it’s just wind-lifted, old snow come again”
[Poetry] — Adam Tavel
“Carter gazes at a thousand shadow treasures / he’ll loot to catalog in haughty solitude / until the war, until his cancer comes.”
[Essay] Splendid Uselessness — Alexandre Leskanich
“At its best knowledge facilitates the emancipation of the human mind from narcissism, conformity, bigotry, intolerance, and hatred. All the more disturbing, then, is the grim spectacle that greets those engaged in its manufacture.”
[Fiction] Chasing Your Tail — Mersiha Bruncevic
“It began with him following me. Then, I decided to follow him instead. Street after street. Bridge after bridge.”
[Fiction] Train — Ali Ackland-Snow
“Eight hours in, the fights begin to break out.”
