Have you ever been infected by a word? I have a memory of a German poet—and I haven’t been able to find this poem—but my memory of the translation is that it included the word “sistercreature.”

The vampire and the ex-rocker make a mournful pair: he with his ruined hands, she with her sad nocturnal life. He needs heroin; she needs blood. He has nothing left to live for; she hasn’t truly lived in centuries. 

Anyway. Go forth and hold still to be astonished slowly by paying attention.

Because we are so close to Marta and her guilt, we see her holding onto anchors that are causing her to sink.

The vampire and the ex-rocker make a mournful pair: he with his ruined hands, she with her sad nocturnal life. He needs heroin; she needs blood. He has nothing left to live for; she hasn’t truly lived in centuries. 

Because we are so close to Marta and her guilt, we see her holding onto anchors that are causing her to sink.

The story of I DO KNOW SOME THINGS is palpable, welling at every edge with urgency

For Wirpsza, a fugue can be a person, notes can be nails that stick in one’s head, and God himself can play the piano of humankind

Have you ever been infected by a word? I have a memory of a German poet—and I haven’t been able to find this poem—but my memory of the translation is that it included the word “sistercreature.”

Anyway. Go forth and hold still to be astonished slowly by paying attention.

How much of our own life do we try to forget, force away? Wendy C. Ortiz lives in those moments. You can see it in her book Excavation, which details her high school teacher’s grooming of her, as it escalates into a full blown relationship; to Hollywood Notebook, a daily record of her twenty-something self […]

You have to let in the world. I have to let in the world in order to get a book to the point that it’s even ready, because I really rely on my readers to help shape it. 

Our history is in the bodies they tried to straighten, the stories they would not write, the lives they refused to archive.

We were kids together. And now we are not.

An oral history is a unique form of nonfiction where, from the beginning, we are given no promise of truth and the editors make no claims toward a clear, ideologically-specific thesis about their subjects.

This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities,” edited by Michelle Chan Schmidt. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here. Ukrainian poetics function as a mode of defense against disappearance and a mode of remembrance in the city. I will address the […]

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This special issue of the FULL STOP QUARTERLY will aim to hold folklore as a prism through which to view connection, the self, and the future. . . . It will explore folklore in and as literature, as process, and as performance.

In times like ours, times of fracture, depravity and upheaval—times which are really not that different than any other time on earth, except for the speed and scale at which violence is exercised—what is the value of art?

Read the introduction to our latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities.”