Excerpts from Crane by Tessa Bolsover
I awake and the boughs, battered and paddling against the window, bruise shadows in the hardwood. Amplified by rain, the sounds inside resonate like pieces of a disassembled object. Slowly, words begin to spread with a viscous clarity over everything... Read More
Three Po-Proses by Kim Hyesoon, translated from Korean by Jack Jung
We question and answer to be nearer to “poetry.” / Literature is inherently unreal. / Poetry lies against the conventional use of language and / Fiction lies against the conventional use of reality. / Perhaps, a writer is someone who knows that after we disappear, what will remain is our lies... Read More
The Torque of Thought by Tom Carlson
The dance only aspires toward that which it is, disclosing neither truth nor rule, but rather the persistence of itself as flux and torque... Read More
Three Texts by Gabriel Blackwell
Fenollosa, whose invention was simultaneously Pound’s most intriguing and least faithful translation, writes that “no full sentence really completes a thought [because] motion leaks everywhere... Read More
Three Poems by Zoe Tuck
How do I write our way in without building a wall, a gate? Here I am looking for an answer from your words, forced instead by circumstances back into my inner resources... Read More
Cognoscenti In a Room Hung with Pictures by Benjamin K. Rice
The cruelty of an image is that it excites us toward an anticipation that it can’t fulfill. It gives by taking away. Though, when Cotán gives me an image of fruit, he does not take away from me any particular instance of pear or pomegranate—instead, he takes away the whole idea of fruit... Read More
Ossuarius by Eva Bujalka
Strange that the air down here should have more the texture of something living it, breathing it. Strange that the air itself should impress upon the living the sensation of breathing in the grave soil, the soil that is so afflicted with several lifetimes’ humors: black bile and phlegm, the cold... Read More
A Missing Suspiria de Profundis by Matt Schumacher
DEAR ______________, I hereby bequeath you the most frustrating case of my career, the baffling phantom, absurd goblin, and born wanderer of alleyways known as Thomas De Quincey. This De Quincey, famously laudanum-laced poet, is almost impossible to track, a slithering enigma, whose escape routes multiply everywhere he turns... Read More
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
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