Saying Celan In Silence by Frank Garrett
After the death of Paul Celan, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commissioned Edmond Jabès to write a memorial work for him. What resulted was a brief essay of sorts entitled, “The Memory of Words: How I Read Paul Celan.” Immediately, within the very first sentence, we confront the conundrum of the written word passing as a... Read More
Editors’ Note: Vestiges_00: Ex-Stasis
Writers are abject beings. Their numbers, like those of cockroaches, are indefinite, and their sight is similarly met with first a grimace of disgust, followed then by scorn. Writing is an art that deals in unwanted gifts, an exercise in the superfluous... Read More
Three Poems by Virginia McLure
On a shelf / on a nail / on top of the door frame / your stares make a triangle / of forward-thrusting gaze. / I dagger down their lines / & slowly, carefully, leg / outside. I check myself: Alive. So it feels right to palm you down / & line your painted faces... Read More
Dark Chamber by Jimmy Chen
An illustration in Albrecht Dürer’s The Painter’s Manual (1525) shows a man attempting to master perspective using a grid through which a reclining model is seen. In the background, two adjacent windows, one functioning as a landscape and the other as a still life, act as grids themselves. For unclear reasons, the model's hand hovers... Read More
A Thousand Lives by Matthew Jakubowski
I wondered about the world between books and people, remembering an old idea I’d read, that we exist first as thoughts, then as words on a page, and only by some ghost of a chance, when someone gets lucky, are we eventually made flesh... Read More
“If I Were Braver I Would Live the Life of an Outlaw”: An Interview with Evelyn Hampton
What I’m pursuing are moments of being able to articulate as clearly as my voice will allow how it is to be inside a human body and unable, most of the time, to communicate what it’s really like to be inside a human body. I long to feel connected to something bigger than the limits... Read More
novae by Daniele Bellomi, trans.from Italian by Anton Ivanov
could have stayed away from the observation point, never again to say / a word about the shadowed part with no one, evaluating distances with eyes / used to a hypothetical explosion, to precede like one proceeds amongst variables / and cautions, proximity to collapse, tracing again the once combusted edge / of anything seen... Read More
Variations In Which She Invents Herself by George Szirtes
What she told herself was true, she thought, and wondered what else she could tell herself. / I have invented fictions of myself that seem truer than what I think I know, she thought. / The fiction of self as invention is the only credible fiction... Read More
Fragments from Gnome by Robert Lunday
When you drive, the landscapes slide sharply through the sides of your face. They fill your cheeks, your temples, they build behind the eyes and ears. Soon they’re ripped by the wind or a gawker’s stare from the back of your head, and you’re again in the landscape... Read More