Image: Cover art for issue #31 of The Lifted Brow by Lee Lai.
Issue #31 of The Lifted Brow is the bridge – or ‘salmagundi’, as the editors put it – between the work of outgoing editors (Ellena Savage and Gillian Terzis) and the incoming team (Annabel Brady-Brown and Zoe Dzunko). Savage and Terzis’ hand is still strong in the composition of this edition, without too many surprises and new features, but I’ll be interested to see what kinds of changes the new team bring.
On the front cover of each edition of The Lifted Brow is the slogan ‘A quarterly attack journal from Australia and the World’. And attack it does – sometimes softly, quietly, but always with intent to keep the culture on its toes.
As a theatre-maker and lover, perhaps I am biased, but Jana Perković’s round-up of what happened in Melbourne theatre this quarter was a highlight for me. Perković’s subjective, rigorously situated analysis is thrilling, drawing links between disparate works, movements and events. In this edition, her sights are set on rape culture, and she writes with unfaltering conviction about the ways this culture was encountered, challenged, maintained or avoided over the course of three months of theatre and lived experience.
But there is so much more to love here. Melinda Harvey’s interview with Ann Goldstein (translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels) is insightful, providing new perspective on the translation process. Wendy C. Oritz explores her body and sexuality through the poetic, radically direct ‘How I Enveloped You: An Incomplete Suite’. Natalie Eilbert’s personal essay Song for Daniel, Stillborn’ is brilliant, exploring the myriad lights and shadows cast upon her life by the stillbirth of her parents’ first child. And there is brilliant comedy, too. Estelle Tang’s ‘Treatments for Future Woody Allen Films’, scattered throughout the edition, are delicious morsels. ‘My year in product recalls’ by Christopher Evans turns the blank language of product recalls into unexpected, delightful, amorphous moments of metaphor and humour. The artwork throughout is also tremendous, and breaks up the issue well, with special mentions to the bleak, weird humour of Nicky Minus, Talya Modlin and Hera Lindsay Bird.
There is a sub-section of this issue entitled ‘Notes from the Queer Unconscious’. Both the magazine’s editorial and the sub-section’s foreword promise that this work will be ‘destructive of systems’. I felt that this was a bit of a false lead, promising a radical re-thinking of the symbolic order that was absent from most of the pieces (one notable exception being Francesca Rendle-Short’s ‘Sub Rosa’. Read without this expectation, however, this section contains some beautiful, insightful writing.
The edition finishes on a double-high. With JP Newnham’s experimental non/fiction piece which is breathtaking, and the issue ends with light-hearted and playful advice on sex and relationships from Jenny Phang and her son Ben Law.
This is a fantastic volume of writing. By turns heartbreaking, thought-provoking, hilarious; always critically engaged. The work in The Lifted Brow would be first-rate in any context; how exciting to see it thriving here in Australia.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
THE LIFTED BROW
Available in stores now
Purchase or subscribe HERE
