The Spring Issue | 2024
Our Spring 2024 issue is packed with poems, stories, and art from around the world and we hope you enjoy the pieces we’ve selected as much as we enjoyed selecting them.
These four poets and their recent books are representative of the poetry currently being written in Southwest England and the country more broadly.
Philosophy of Life 101
Summer 1985
Exams are due by 1 pm Thursday, February 17, 2067.
When they call her name, he kisses her, and she tastes his salty lips. The nurse, unsmiling in her brisk white uniform, leads her into an examining room.
We remember, wrapped in black ropes that swayed / me, a cradlesong in the embrace of the snake, / our hearts cracked to cast together better.
Once, a teacher / told me—Need is a bad word. She // stood in front of the class, frowning / at its long ‘e’ sound, as a mother // might frown at her young child / who’s just peed her pants.
Our Spring 2024 issue is packed with poems, stories, and art from around the world and we hope you enjoy the pieces we’ve selected as much as we enjoyed selecting them.
You must think that I am handling this poorly. My sister taught me that, too: how grief seizes us, paralyzes, renders us speechless and seemingly dumb. How in such a state, it’s best to look one’s best.
Philosophy of Life 101
Summer 1985
Exams are due by 1 pm Thursday, February 17, 2067.
We remember, wrapped in black ropes that swayed / me, a cradlesong in the embrace of the snake, / our hearts cracked to cast together
Once, a teacher / told me—Need is a bad word. She // stood in front of the class, frowning / at its long ‘e’ sound,
I’m five years old / again, refusing to wear Bermuda / shorts, begging mom to buy only / long pants, long enough to hide /
When they call her name, he kisses her, and she tastes his salty lips. The nurse, unsmiling in her brisk white uniform, leads her into
You must think that I am handling this poorly. My sister taught me that, too: how grief seizes us, paralyzes, renders us speechless and seemingly
We each have a role. I am the storyteller. She is the muse. She’s Romanian. She looks like a Gypsy. A beautiful Gypsy. She says
I have never had a particularly good imagination. Really, it’s kind of dire. It irritates my wife that I can’t imagine a future. I’m not
The fire on the American mountainside was dying down. My thought was that horror cannot be cheated if hope is to become believable.
There must be thousands of us non-Southerners with similar secret histories, people who profited from the crime of slavery and continue to do so.
Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors
From her earliest work — before the idea of eco-entanglement was widely adopted by poets — Arnold viewed nature not as an ‘object’ or ‘other’ but as an inextricable (and clearly endangered) system in which humanity participates.
We’ve been lucky enough to publish many, many brilliant, original, and moving pieces — and there are several amongst them that could easily be included within this list. But these pieces here, these are five that, for whatever reasons, have stayed with me.
Weaving together disparate references spanning across histories and geographies, German interdisciplinary artist Johanna Strobel explores the entanglement between philosophy, semiotics, and actuality.
Padma Rajendran’s works on fabric experiment with the clash and combination of patterning and storytelling. She received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and teaches drawing at Vassar College.
Mi’kmaq/L’nu artist and author Michelle Sylliboy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised on her traditional L’nuk territory in We’koqmaq, Cape Breton. Her published collection of photographs and L’nuk hieroglyphic poetry, Kiskajeyi—I Am Ready, won the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award. Jessica Mensch interviewed her this summer at her home.
“The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem.”
The Russian Civil War was a truly terrible event in terms of awful acts of atrocious violence, but there’s also a weird sense of farce about this, of history being played at the wrong speed.
Andrey Filimonov comes from Tomsk, the 400-year-old “Athens of Siberia” and center of White Russian resistance during the Russian Civil War.
© 2024 | B O D Y | bodyliterature.com