Issue 53: Spring 2021

Fiction

The past catches up

In the beginning I had a hard time getting used to the sound of your footsteps.

You’ll dance, Miss Snub-nose

At the back of the human body, there’s a particular region where no hand can reach. Neither the right nor the left, no hand can in any way reach all those spots.

Contre-jour

The painting, when seen by candlelight, appears faded yet moving. The flickering flame seems to enliven the picture, giving it shadow and light in ways I never could.
Poetry

tattoo ideas

a heart weighed against a brick/ a skull broken in the places that my jaw was broken

origin stories for a scar

Invention of poetry

Ritual

Sacred Loss

Memory is sleeping

Four Poems

Essays

Genre and Justice: Interrogating Detective Fiction

How can detective fiction be abolitionist? To love genre is to interrogate it, to obsess over its tropes and tricks and histories and futures, to engage with a book or a story or a movie as part of a system of repetition.

A Much Better Mother When I Write

“As we write we are both describing and deciding the direction that our life is taking.” —Julia Cameron
Interviews

On Constraints and Vibrancy: A Conversation on Writing Kill the Mall with Pasha Malla and Adnan Khan

Kill the Mall is Pasha Malla’s sixth book, following two books of poetry, a short story collection, and two novels. His oeuvre is marked by its formal ambition—each work considers questions of plot, character, and narrative fresh, twisting traditional techniques into new ways of seeing.

Language is already a poem: Erín Moure and Klara du Plessis in Conversation

On October 13, 2020, Erín Moure and Klara du Plessis reflected on language, translingualism, and translation at a joint poetry reading for the Atwater Poetry Project, facilitated online from Montreal by poet and curator Rachel McCrum.
Reviews

The Theorist in Love: Maria Cichosz’s Cam & Beau

If you’ve ever worked through critical theory in any substantive way, you know that it can mess with your head.

Holy Blooms of Loss: Rebecca Salazar’s sulphurtongue

What do you call it when noticing expands? When noticing and knowing and suggesting, guiding, evoking, get their wires crossed?

The Trauma of Living: Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s knot body

When I receive a book of poetry, I know I can break the rules. I could open the book in the middle, or start from the back, or read the same lines over and over and leave some parts entirely unread.