“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.”
[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.”
[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.”
[Poetry] — Tom Holmes
“This is where Oppenheimer lived / before he ended the war, / where he read the Bhagavad Gita”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Poetry] ‘Net Curtains’ — DS Maolalai
“this morning is milk / with a thick mist / of souplight”
[Editorial] Solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Links to anti-racist educational resources and how to support and donate to anti-racist causes and organisations
New Critique stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
