Masthead offers its usual variety: a wide selection of poems, essays and original works ranging across contemporary issues.  ISLAM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, an interview with the Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, is the most profound analysis I've read since the events of September 11 of the cultural dilemmas of Islam and its relationship to the Western Christian world.  The Australian poet  John Kinsella considers aspects of quarantine - including the quarantining of refugees - in PLAGUES AND BIOETHICS.  And musicologist Richard Toop looks at a disturbing new tone in critical discourse around contemporary US music in THE CASE FOR CONTROL.

Issue 5 includes poetry by Randolph Healy, Elizabeth James, Trevor Joyce, Pierre Joris (including Joris' translations of Pablo Picasso), Jacinta le Plastrier, Sophie Levy, Alan Sondheim and Harriet Zinnes.  There is an emphasis on texts for performance: poetic texts for theatre, like Margaret Cameron's remarkable KNOWLEDGE AND MELANCHOLY or David Bircumshaw's BONE, or poems with a performative edge, like Sophie Levy's TAKEN/OUT OF CONTEXT; and I'm proud to publish a fascinating and very amusing interview with the Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek.  Sophie Levy also considers questions of gender in innovative lyric poetry by women, and, from an entirely different place, Jacinta le Plastrier offers a poetic essay on the same question.  And, last but by no means least, I'm delighted to host two photoessays by Melbourne photographer Jacqueline Mitelman, DOG PORTRAITS and HERRING ISLAND SERIES.  The cover image for this issue is from the Herring Island series.