HEAT Series 1

Running in a sequence of dismembered sections, the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes can be read as a kind of fragmented text. Its choked tunnels, collapsed archways, brief truncated arcades can be seen as the scattered passages, say, of some early ontological discourse.

In Nabatieh, the small town in the south of Lebanon my forebears and I come from, Hassiba has been the uncontested diva of Ashura.

I was writing a long and labyrinthine poem in which I opened up / and at the same time stepped into that openness, stillness, with a white voice

Imre Salusinszky and Stephen Mills, interviewed Richard Ford for HEAT when he visited Sydney in March, 2000.

On the seventh dune we stopped, searched, and found the plant. It was almost anticlimactic to see it extending out of the red crest of dune. A pale, unremarkable-looking shrub with small bell-shaped flowers.

Two poems – ‘Night of Electrical storm’ and ‘Night of Poverty’ – by Bulgarian writer Kapka Kassabova.

Sometimes I think I’d like to be the world’s first Featherwoman, writes renowned cartoonist Judy Horacek.

When the Sydney Swans met the Hawthorn Football Club at the Sydney Cricket Ground in May last year, the game was a strange kind of anti-football: topsy-turvy, through the looking glass.

How could I doubt both myself and the world? / you cannot command the rain to stop nor a bird to perch on your  hand / imagination is like a knife—a single flash / and my soul is drenched in sweat

Much contemporary art is a bit too worldly for the polite lust of the connoisseur or the headache-inducing world of academic theory. By ‘worldliness’ I mean the application of common taste, acquired from looking not just at art, or texts, but at the world and everything. 

We in the American middle-class grew up in a world almost entirely devoid of smells, except for that of household cleaning products, and barely remember our childhoods at all, except for the television programmes.

The Greek commanders, Nestor, Agamemnon and the rest, could do nothing but wait, unheroically, for the cloud to lift from their champion’s brow. Till it did, they dared not move.

By the marvels of science my skeleton had been wholly drawn out from my body and had been replaced in my body by a synthetic substitute.

than in Crete. More like olive trees. They rise / from the earth like burning snakes. The trees also burn. / Bushes, the basilica, stones, all remain black.

A sequence of five love poems by the poet, novelist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Luke Davies.

A sequence of poems by Emma Lew: ‘Snow Gold’, ‘My Illusion of the Tycoon’ and ‘Jasmine’.