In this highly anticipated new issue, we encounter brilliant examples of what writing can do in a hypernormal time – whether that's Benjamin Gready on the absurdity of fieldwork on land under active occupation or Zahid Gamieldien's short story about a dancing rat who finds itself enmeshed in systems too shadowy to be true. But, as with the emotional cycles of resistance, hope and snark are features too. Dan Hogan considers the lawn as a class obsession, and π.ο. asks a question: why people hate poetry? We also read about a rakhasa family who passes on wisdom to their young kin, a story by Shefali Mathew. And you’ll find new poetry by Eli McLean, Fiona Hile and Sol Chan, among others, as well as a comic by Safdar Ahmed, plus heaps more. Co-editors Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk write in the editorial, "Writing always matters, but it matters most directly in the face of this kind of thuggish assault on language, our first and last commons. We can’t let the bastards have it.”
aj Carruthers is a literary critic and experimental poet, author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, a group of studies on Langston Hughes, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and others, two volumes of a lifelong poem AXIS Book 1: Areal and AXIS Book 2, and a sound work Consonata. He has just completed Languages of Invention, a study of Australian avant-garde poetry and the uses of literary history, and writing has commenced on his next project The Critical Exterior, a study of criticism’s “three exteriors” – theory, history, prophecy – and literary exteriority. He is a lecturer at SUIBE.
