Welcome to Issue 8! This is a bumper issue showcasing a wide variety of unique local and international voices.

In fiction, we boast four short stories that each, in their own distinctive way, explore the subject of family. In Jane Skelton’s moving ‘Fire Circle’, an elderly woman is enmeshed in memories of family that are inextricable from her bushland home in the Blue Mountains of NSW. In her lyrical ‘Cycles of Life’, Teresa Capetola’s protagonist reflects on her life as a daughter to Italian immigrant parents, as well as her role as a mother, while cycling through suburban Melbourne. Zoe Panteladis’ ‘Harbinger’ brings a Young Adult lens to fractured Greek family life in her fresh retelling of Hesiod’s ‘Theogony’. And in PEN contributor Sabal Phyu Nu’s story ‘The Woman from a Bombed City’, a Myanmar woman reflects from afar on the family and hometown that war has forced her to flee.

This issue also features three distinct and thought-provoking essays. In ‘Poetry and the Language of Seduction’, Denise O’Hagan advocates for a multisensory engagement with poetry, drawing on poems by Robert Graves, Antigone Kefala and Yannis Ritsos. Dean Kalimniou’s ‘In the Horse’s Belly: Kalamaras’ Poets and the Aegean Inside Us’ expertly analyses the latest book by Greek-American poet (and contributor to this issue) George Kalamaras, focusing on Kalamaras’ communion with his ancestors and legendary Greek poets. And finally, Jordana Silverstein, in her powerful personal essay, ‘Where to begin: On Diasporism Over Diaspora’, highlights the pain that international conflicts cause to identity and sense of self by constantly questioning her own shifting positions and thoughts about where to belong and where to place the emphasis.

This issue’s feature interview is with Professor Mirjana Lozanovska from Deakin University. Mirjana is a researcher and scholar who pioneered the thinking on the impact of migration on the built environment within Australia. Mirjana has also charted the impact of emigration, on her case study example of the village of Zavoj, Macedonia.

Our feature poet is Ender Başkan who brings us ‘RAGE’, a longform epic sprawling across forms of shame, anger, violence and justice in both authoritarianism and revolution. Through the opening and closing iris of domesticity, raising children, work, daily routine, class struggle, and empire, Başkan inscribes the future into the present (“abolition starts at the breakfast table”).

Michael Alexandratos creates ‘A Righteous Vengeance’, a prose translation of Georgios Tertsetis’s ‘Η δικαία εκδίκησις’ (1847), the first poem in the Modern Greek language that explicitly references homosexuality. Phu-Linh Tran explores memory and time in her poem ‘Palindrome’. Deborah Marcus offers two haunting poems, ‘stonemilker’ and ‘linearity unhinging linearity’. George Kalamaras’ three poems commune with legendary Greek poets Veroniki Dalakoura, Byron Leondaris, and Katerina Gogou.

In book reviews, Manisha Anjali traverses Hana Pera Aoake’s Blame It On The Rain, which—against the violent polycrisis of colonial modernity—asserts the survival and reclamation of land back, body back. Kalliope X’s David Roberts reviews The Sun at Eight or Nine by Ouyang Yu, a fractured novel whose protagonist, born of the decay of China’s Cultural Revolution, incarnates failure as both a reality and a site of potential. Riya Rajesh refracts Eileen Chong’s latest collection, We Speak of Flowers, a 101-fragment poem that invites the reader to participate in its deft intuitions of grief, truth, death, ancestry, and the limits of poetry.

In Among the Chaos, Michael Winkler, whose most recent publication is the novel Griefdogg, brings us both into his writing space and his writing process.

Enjoy issue 8 and check out our social pages.

Kalliope X