'In ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’ JH Prynne writes that “no poet has or can have clean hands, because clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean hands do no worthwhile work.” Resistance is the tenor of reality, and action in it is compromised, bloody-handed, in the world and of it. In some senses it can seem that an ever-larger stake of leftist discourse is consumed by a miserabilist scramble for seniority on a narrowing mesa of unhistorical piety. In the crisis of social, ethical, and ecological collapse that greets us daily, clean hands look more than ever like magical thinking.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, Introduction)
Only literary material within AustLit's scope (individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Our Death: Aspects of the radical in Sean Bonney’s last book of poems by Toby Fitch and Sean Bonney
Looming Poetics by Elena Gomez
Critique This by Justin Clemens
On Radical Love by Clelia Rodriguez
Striking Back to Stop the War on Our Planet by Padraic Gibson
Practical Epiphanies by Joshua Mostafa
Parallel Dimensional Man by Omer Wissman
Prognostication by A.J. Carruthers
The Houseguest by Jenah Shaw
'Midnight Oil introduced me to radical politics in the 1980s. Their lyrics opened my eyes to how the world and its problems were greater than my teenage narcissism had allowed. By the time I was studying literature at university, my journal of choice was naturally Overland. Established in Melbourne in 1954 by anti-Stalinist members of the Communist Party of Australia, Overland still prides itself on being the only radical literary journal in Australia, though others have made ground, attesting to an increased radicalism in literary culture generally.' (Introduction)
'Midnight Oil introduced me to radical politics in the 1980s. Their lyrics opened my eyes to how the world and its problems were greater than my teenage narcissism had allowed. By the time I was studying literature at university, my journal of choice was naturally Overland. Established in Melbourne in 1954 by anti-Stalinist members of the Communist Party of Australia, Overland still prides itself on being the only radical literary journal in Australia, though others have made ground, attesting to an increased radicalism in literary culture generally.' (Introduction)
