The Archive

Wander the full collection — every essay, poem, translation, and work of art. Browse by theme below, or step into a curated issue.

73 works

Plastics and developmental biology : constructing form

Plastics and developmental biology : constructing form

Biological form emerges from the organisation of cells, tissues and mechanical forces. Developmental biology reveals the principles by which anatomy is constructed, while plastic surgery applies and interrogates these principles to restore form and function when biological architecture is disrupted

Metaphor or Simile?

A quick literary-device game: tell metaphor from simile.

Deceased Estate

Deceased Estate

In the quiet ritual of Saturday garage sales, Victor finds escape from a life grown colourless. But at a deceased estate in Wavell Heights, an old piano awakens ghosts of music, loss, and the possibility of beginning again.

A Star Is Born: Winners of the Ninth Heaven Summer Short Story Competition

A Star Is Born: Winners of the Ninth Heaven Summer Short Story Competition

The winning and shortlisted stories from Ninth Heaven's first Summer Short Story Competition — with the editor's foreword, the judge's selections, and the full anthology, “A Star Is Born.”

Update: A New Direction for Science Newsletter

Update: A New Direction for Science Newsletter

Rebranding to developmental biology / Plastic surgery newsletters

Live As You Exist

Live as You Exist highlights the common struggle of chronic rumination and the cruelty that is its often-cyclical nature. Winner of the 2nd NH Witty Poets Competition.

NH Portraits — A Conversation with Elise Powers

NH Portraits — A Conversation with Elise Powers

The second in our series of contributor portraits. Elise Powers is a Seattle-based poet whose work explores identity, womanhood, and the sacred ordinary. Her debut collection, The Size of Your Joy, is forthcoming from Central Avenue Publishing in spring 2026.

NHLAA Global Adopts a New Constitution

Ninth Heaven Literature & Arts Association Inc., operating globally as NHLAA Global, is pleased to announce the formal adoption of its governing constitution.

Percy Shelley to Teresa Viviani

Percy Shelley to Teresa Viviani

Committee Appointment Notice

Committee Appointment Notice

Tickets - Ninth Heaven Community Event and Awards Night

Thank you for 200+ submissions

Charity at 11

Charity at 11

A nocturnal meditation on guilt and charity in Oxford’s winter hush. The poem follows a speaker wandering Little Clarendon Street, caught between pity and self-reproach, where an act of giving becomes a reckoning with solitude, privilege, and the limits of goodness.

I Wish I Still Had Time to Ask About The Camellias

I Wish I Still Had Time to Ask About The Camellias

"This piece focuses on the realization that I can no longer ask my grandmother, who has dementia, about the details of her life when she was younger; it's a reflection on memories being lost within a person."

3 Poems

3 Poems

Fib, cue, xyz, both individually and as a combination of imageries, tells about how we or our senses are expanded into the unseen dimensions of the seen.

The Little Pilgrim

The Little Pilgrim

Bailey's sensual evocation of a young woman’s attempt to re establish a stable identity after the devastation of unforeseen betrayal, heartbreak and a near death experience.

Office Maid by Julia Clark

This poem juxtaposes the mundanity of contemporary office work with the fantasticality of supernatural mythology for a surreal take on modern work culture and its often obscured ties to environmental destruction and capitalism exploitation.

Ancient Whispers: A Mythic Poem Sequence

Ancient Whispers: A Mythic Poem Sequence

These poems are drawn from a sequence entitled “Ancient Whispers” that utilize themes from classical or Slavic myth. Each poem deals with the irony and vicissitudes of human experience.

Auxier Ridge Trail

Auxier Ridge Trail

“Auxier Ridge Trail” is a lyric meditation on emotional exhaustion, intimacy, and the erosive beauty of shared experience within a natural landscape.

Dying Generously

Dying Generously

Philosophy essay on death and assisted dying, tackling some arguments and counterarguments for medically assisted dying.

Nekyia and four poems

Nekyia and four poems

Five poems of the soul’s striving toward the divine.

Five Poems by John Leonard

Five Poems by John Leonard

These are five poems showcasing some of Leonard's different poetic forms.

Professor Nick Fisk AM: PhD training, AI, Research Integrity and the frontiers of medical research

Professor Nick Fisk AM: PhD training, AI, Research Integrity and the frontiers of medical research

On PhD training, artificial intelligence in science, and research integrity.

Martina Bonomi: Structural biology of the T cell receptor and AlphaFold

Martina Bonomi: Structural biology of the T cell receptor and AlphaFold

On the structural biology of the T cell receptor and AlphaFold.

Ned Dickson: Founder of Real History Walking Tours

Ned Dickson: Founder of Real History Walking Tours

Founder of Real History Walking Tours, on curiosity and a city's hidden history.

NH Portraits — A Conversation with GUSKY

NH Portraits — A Conversation with GUSKY

GUSKY is an American multidisciplinary artist and writer who's work moves between painting, writing, and intuitive image-making. In this portrait he discusses the origins of his practice, the themes that hold him, and the pieces he brought into Ninth Heaven.

Smriti Bangera: Co-Founder of Chloris Labs

Smriti Bangera: Co-Founder of Chloris Labs

Co-founder of Chloris Labs, on building a science company from the ground up.

Turning the Soul: Plato on Education

Turning the Soul: Plato on Education

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave presents education as a journey from illusion to truth. This transformation is grounded in the hierarchy of knowledge, the Form of the Good, and in moral virtues.

NH Summer Short Story Comp

NH Summer Short Story Comp

$1000 dollar prize pool. Opens short story writing Competition. Mid February Deadline. $10 entry fee.

A New Hampshire River

A New Hampshire River

A river's current gives a sense of rebirth, negating possible feelings of loss.

The Long Argument Against Suicide

The Long Argument Against Suicide

Suicide solves nothing at all, it only shifts the problem to another state of consciousness.

The Dogwood + 7 poems by Elise Powers

The Dogwood + 7 poems by Elise Powers

8 poems, each exploring the intersections of memory, tenderness, and the sacred ordinary.

On Nature Rewritten

On Nature Rewritten

This piece explores humanity’s enduring tension between reverence and reason, and the impulse to shape life itself. Drawing on Aristotle, Spinoza, and the Romantics, it argues that creation is not a trespass against nature but the highest expression of our rational and divine curiosity.

Announcing Calls for Issue II: Blue Spring

Submissions open 2 November — close 11 December

Committee Resolution — Establishment of Non-Profit Association Account

Committee Resolution — Establishment of Non-Profit Association Account

Incorporation of the Ninth Heaven Literature & Arts Association

The Ninth Heaven Literature & Arts Association has been registered as an incorporated association in New South Wales under the Associations Incorporation Act 2009.

Of The Ambition to Become Pitiable

Of The Ambition to Become Pitiable

Innocence and pitiability have so far only been defined in negation to evil. The following attempts to describe them in positive terms.

Education, Truth and Practice

Education, Truth and Practice

The debut episode — on education, truth, and practice.

Welcome to the Advisory Board

Welcome to the Advisory Board

Welcome to the Ninth Heaven Association Newsletter

Welcome to the Ninth Heaven Association Newsletter

Editor's Foreword

Editor's Foreword

Foreword by the Publications Director. On silence, solitude, and the search for clarity amid the noise of the age.

Short Story: The Reader Digests

Short Story: The Reader Digests

A short fiction piece about the self-mythology of a mediocre man.

Do Only I Exist: Some Not-so-Solipsistic Views

Do Only I Exist: Some Not-so-Solipsistic Views

Exploring Husserl and Wittgenstein on solipsism: is reality only mine, or shared through intersubjectivity, language, and experience?

A Liberal Case for Natural Law

A Liberal Case for Natural Law

Is law fundamentally natural or man-made? Are there constraints on possible law beyond whatever governments can enforce with threats of violence? Does rule of law, not men, have any meaning if laws are always enforced and interpreted by men?

What Durkheim Dreams About

What Durkheim Dreams About

“What Durkheim Dreams About” is a poem I wrote while taking a sociology class and having to read excerpts from Durkheim’s Suicide. I disliked his approach to life and wrote this poem inspired by that, as sort of a subversion and way to try to empathize with what he was saying.

Five Poems by Sreelekha Chatterjee

Five Poems by Sreelekha Chatterjee

My mind experiences an emotional barrenness, resembling an empty terrace. An empty seat is forever there, indicating an absence, perhaps a spiritual emptiness.

When the Body Breaks

When the Body Breaks

When the Body Breaks” explores physical illness as a spiritual unraveling that nonetheless makes space for reverence. This poem exists in the tension between alienation and awe, asking what it means to carry pain with dignity and whether the soul’s transformations might be holy in their fragility

On Beauty

On Beauty

Can we make objective judgments of beauty? Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder? The following essay argues that we can indeed make objective judgments of beauty, although beauty itself is nothing other than a kind of subjective experience of pleasure.

Beauty and the Grotesque: How Art Speaks to the Self

Beauty and the Grotesque: How Art Speaks to the Self

Great art can help us experience our most fundamental humanity.

Five Poems by Sanjeev Sethi

Five Poems by Sanjeev Sethi

We let no flügelhorn animate the atmosphere. Our presence drew the stelliferous to a party of two. In the reign of rhythms, we repeatedly heard our song; meaningful to us but mute to the others. That is how strains are or should be.

A Chance to Make It

A Chance to Make It

Cosmic re-enactment in the path of Ars Regia.

Corpuscules in Corners

Corpuscules in Corners

I want to work back to that intuition I had of the infinity of the self— that this world is bursting at its seams and margins with the divine. Is coming home to oneself like turning from ashes and ashes to dust in corners?

The Philosophy of Quantum Physics 7: Is Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete?

The Philosophy of Quantum Physics 7: Is Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete?

A look at different philosophical interpretations of quantum physics. This is the seventh post in the series.

Time and Eternity: Is the Kingdom in the Present?

Time and Eternity: Is the Kingdom in the Present?

Time is like reading a single page at a time, while eternity is like holding the entire book in your hands and seeing all pages simultaneously.

Towards a Glass Menagerie: Mourning in Joan Didion and Walter Benjamin

Towards a Glass Menagerie: Mourning in Joan Didion and Walter Benjamin

The journalism of Joan Didion has an askant attitude towards the world. It is as if it has, the result of some sort of carelessness, accidentally fallen out of time and lies there as refuse on the floor waiting for it to be all over.

End Times

End Times

The unending nature of infinities and forever that repeats over and over through the cosmos and nature's laws in the destiny of a small soul's minute journey through the vastness of space and the immensity of time.

4 Poems by Barbara Siegel Carlson

4 Poems by Barbara Siegel Carlson

The natural world teaches lessons about human life and its expansion into the spiritual and metaphysical. Winter branches and onions become metaphors for larger truths. Art and music are also inspirations to deeper understanding.

Vocational

Vocational

"Vocational" is a micro-narrative that explores the depth of memory particularly through the lens of religion. This poem hopes to have achieved that religion and the spiritual life permeates every choice and is able to be arrived back to after a lapse, while also grappling with the middle.

Ode to the Rug on My Living Room Floor

Ode to the Rug on My Living Room Floor

An intimate look at new and old love, with inherited memories and objects giving life to new ones in nuanced but familiar ways. The poem, rich in texture and sound, allows the reader to situate themselves in the love of once-new things, now washed in the fondness and grief of time passed.

On Descartes and Certainty

On Descartes and Certainty

An essay about Cartesian certainty and its role in global scepticism. It is argued that we should reject his views: the condition of certainty imposes on knowledge is too strong to be acceptable to the point that it undermines itself and hence his rationalist project is ultimately self-defeating.

Every Howling Thing

Every Howling Thing

As jackals approach a town, the townspeople must flee before nightfall. They all run except for a deaf girl, mourning her dead rabbit.

Improving the Self through Virtue Ethics

Improving the Self through Virtue Ethics

This essay is about the applications of virtue ethics - a normative theory of ethics - in everyday life. Normative ethics, virtue ethics, and its applications to self-improvement are discussed.

Six Pieces by GUSKY

Six Pieces by GUSKY

A series of evocative pieces by the internationally acclaimed American artist, Gusky.

Stillness Between Pages

Stillness Between Pages

A reflection on daily reading

Does God cause the grass to grow?

Does God cause the grass to grow?

Is it truly God that causes the grass to grow? Is not the growth of such grass fully explained by science? If matter provides a sufficient explanation, how can God be regarded as the cause?

Black Box

Black Box

A short fiction piece about a girl, a girl, a hallway, a kitchen, and perhaps another glass of wine.

crab apple

crab apple

A poem about crab apples and self-acceptance, when who you are doesn’t seem to be ‘enough’ in someone else’s eyes.

The Deconstruction Construction Project; Documented

The Deconstruction Construction Project; Documented

As humans, we are drawn towards what is familiar and safe; we desperately claw at comfort and reject discomfort. But what happens to us when we are completely out of our element?

Love, fairness and the problem of value

Love, fairness and the problem of value

This essay is primarily concerned with love as a moral action between two volitions. It is critical of the instrumental view of reality adopted in contemporary conceptions of economics, and utilitarian ethics.

That Fairness is a Quality of Love

That Fairness is a Quality of Love

Fairness is the quality of love that does not subjectify or objectify but enfolds as the father did his prodigal son. In it is the love that radiates and the love that soothes, the love that comes from the ocean and the sun

Respecting Antigone

Respecting Antigone

This is the commiserating heart that is both rare and common: common as in all men and women possess it; rare as in few bring it to finality. Antigone was able to maintain her original heart and develop her virtue, immortalising herself and her love for her loved ones.

Our purpose

Our purpose

The Ascension, and Will of Heaven

The Ascension, and Will of Heaven

We have a moral prerogative, an instillation within our nature, a call of destiny, that those of us, those of us with ability–or with the impetus to seek to become capable–must thoroughly transform and be the bedrock and foundation of our culture.