I wanted to focus on language alone and its sheer force, uncontained by formal, philosophical, and empirical systems and thought.
Instead of a few more excellent but redundant versions of Dead Souls or Crime and Punishment, why couldn’t the same people give us the first translations of Pisemsky’s Troubled Seas, Khvoshchinskaya’s In Hope of Something Better, or Leskov’s “Episcopal Justice”?
Writing to make sense of things feels both prophylactic (I will process an event, a thought in a safe space) and at times a little dangerous (Is it safe? what will happen as I bore further and further down?)
Adedayo Agarau and Isabella DeSendi
We are presenting a version of truth that perhaps no one will ever present in the same way we have. I am, we are, the scar, the proof, a testimony. How lucky we are to have language to help leave our marks on this world.
That’s exactly why I come to poems. I want an invitation and a command inflicted upon me. Boss me around to a better place, I say.
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.
I’d love to think that Lonesome Ballroom…might prove one of many “weird” books that make our broader tradition stranger and therefore stronger, more strapping.