HEAT 20 offers new writing from David Sornig, Eliot Weinberger, Max Easton, Mariana Enrquez (trans. Alice Whitmore), Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Dani Netherclift.

By what violence, the lamb's being asked, by what love, by what momentum of force have I been delivered up to the present? What end is there to this pain, to this thirst and hunger and fatigue? So writes David Sornig in his essay 'Os Sacrum' for HEAT 20. In this issue, big, dark, unanswerable questions are asked by each piece, and in their combined courage to ask, we are afforded a remarkable effect of hope and grim beauty.

In his essay, Sornig makes a pilgrimage across the wastelands to the west of Melbourne, following the creeks and creek beds of a landscape in the wake of a punishing industrial period while he pieces together bad dreams and memories of a lost friendship. In Eliot Weinberger's poem 'What Remains [3rd Century/21st Century]', the poet sews fragments of the Book of Giants together to address a deep and awesome Manichaean voice to our present decline. In her essay 'Preludes #2', Dani Netherclift attempts to face the inconceivable coming of her dying mother's passing in this age of denial, and turns to her ancestral archives for understanding.

Mariana Enrquez's story 'Main Building, Tenth Floor' (translated by Alice Whitmore) imagines a highly controlled world where a small flame of connection flickers between two people who have no future. Daryl Lim Wei Jie's melancholy and lascivious poems dart and duck across each page searching for something more. And Max Easton's story 'Tourist Trap' follows Helen (of his novel Paradise Estate) to the squats of Milan, where, standing at the fringes of her friends' lives, she is made to see the mess and struggle for anyone who dares to grow roots.