HEAT

In this latest issue of HEAT, Australia's international literary magazine, big, dark, unanswerable questions are asked by each piece, and in their combined courage to ask, we are afforded a remarkable effect of hope and grim beauty. The issue includes new writing from David Sornig, Eliot Weinberger, Max Easton, Mariana Enriquez (trans. Alice Whitmore), Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Dani Netherclift.By what violence, the lamb's being asked, by what love, by what momentum of force have I been delivered up to the present? What end is there to this pain, to this thirst and hunger and fatigue? So writes David Sornig writes in his essay 'Os Sacrum' for HEAT 20. In Eliot Weinberger's poem 'What Remains [3rd Century/21st Century]', the poet sews fragments of the dead sea scrolls together to address a deep and awesome old-testament voice to our present decline. In 'Os Sacrum', Sornig makes a pilgrimage across the wastelands to the west of Melbourne, following the creeks and creekbeds of a landscape in the wake of a punishing industrial period while he pieces together bad dreams and memories of a lost friendship. In her essay 'Preludes #2', Dani Netherclift attempts to face the terrible and inconceivable coming of her dying mother's passing in this age of denial, and turns to her ancestral archives for understanding.Mariana Enriquez's story 'Main Building, Tenth Floor' (trans. Alice Whitmore) imagines a highly controlled world wherea small flame of connection flickers between two people who have no future. Daryl Lim Wei Jie's melancholy and lascivious poems dart and duck across each page searching for something more. And Max Easton's story 'Tourist Trap' follows Helen (of his novel Paradise Estate) to Milan on a quest for escape, which instead, standing at the fringes of her friends' lives, brings her face to face with the messiness of life for anyone who dares to grow roots.