New issue: Jaymee Goh, Lev Mirov, reviews

Hi all -- this week's issue is up!

This week's story is "Liminal Grid" by Jaymee Goh:

Because you live there, in that condemned building, you know that the plants in the buildings are carefully planted into a low-maintenance, edible garden. What looks like lalang is actually serai. The branches of the trees hang with fruit that feed the local fauna on the outside, but inside, they are covered with discarded CDs to confuse the birds. There are window boxes on the inside growing leafy vegetables, and chickens are allowed to run free to keep down pests. The courtyard used to have a pool—it still sort of does, but it is home to a crop of water-plants.

This week's poem is "I Am Alive" by Lev Mirov:

I grip tight my pocket-watch and measure the passage of time. I am alive.
When I am not watching it does not always go ahead—
time loops back around, the past rising like a yeast foam head
feeding on my water-logged lungs and broken bones that have never fractured.
I have tried to make my peace with the passage of time
but we have not been quite square since the day I died.

And our first review this week sees Paul Kincaid examining Iain Pears' Arcadia:

There has always been something mysterious, not quite graspable, about the idea of Arcadia—best exemplified, perhaps, by Nicholas Poussin's 1637 painting, "The Arcadian Shepherds." Here, three rustics display to a well-dressed woman a tomb upon which is inscribed "Et in Arcadia Ego." That strange, incomplete line has inspired a variety of interpretations, but the phrase is generally taken to mean that even in paradise there is death. There is a specific reference to this picture in Iain Pears's Arcadia: we are clearly meant to have in mind this idea of a worm in the bud as we encounter this particular pastoral utopia.

Enjoy!

-- Niall