Elese Dowden

259: Feb/Mar 2026 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.

“What is difficult,” writes Vivian Blaxell in Worthy of the Event, is “the possibility that the greatest beauty of all beauties may be the beauty of everything fucking off in one way or another.” As I write this, Vivian has fucked off to the heart of an Empire to promote her book. In Naarm, I am beginning to worry about my own fucking off. I have completed my thirty-third year, which my partner calls “the Jesus year”.

Though known by his business cards as a famous poet, π.O. is foremost an anarchist landscape artist working against the sanitised tradition of the state-sanctioned pastoral (an institution that makes colonial settlement possible). At least, that is, in his magnum opus, Heide, published by Giramondo in 2019.