Cirrus@Austlit

'The sun came out, momentarily, everything brighter, then the clouds came over and rain came down, sifting through the air. Looking over the city, a white curtain. – Antigone Kefala

'This month’s HEAT offers revelations about the nature of intimacy and mortality. In her first fiction publication, writer and director Alena Lodkina shares two short stories that depict the knotty business of female friendship. Marianne Boruch, an American poet who spent 2019 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Canberra, has a triptych of poems about artistic practice. In elegant vignettes, Bonny Cassidy reflects on her father’s cognitive decline. Ender Başkan contributes three poems that cover parenting, family holidays, and ‘the erotics of bookselling’. And completing the issue: Antigone Kefala‘s last journals, which provide remarkable insight into the final months of one of Australia’s best (and most overlooked) writers, who died at the age of ninety-one in December last year. With her distinctive poetic sensibility, Kefala records the changing of the seasons and offers wry, exacting commentary on everything from interior design and online shopping to the mediocrity of Australian politics and media, the injustice of the war in Ukraine, and the futility of ageing.' (Publication summary)