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.
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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.
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.
Shopping center. A boy of about six trailing his parents—skinny kid with tousled hair, three of them heading toward their car.
“If we weren’t in this parking lot I’d slap the shit out of you,” the mother says to the boy.
Nobody wants to hear a white guy going on about / the black people he has known, especially not / a white guy who hasn’t
Role play is harder / alone in the hotel room, / it being more difficult / to suspend disbelief / single-handedly.
And because I was not good, I did not step inside / the ark. The flood came and went and my body, // in rebuke
It drifted along the side of the building, higher and higher, seemingly aiming to land on the flat rooftop, but then it suddenly slowed down,
I am here, watching on TV the President and Vice President of the United States of America run on a hamster wheel.
Philosophy of Life 101
Summer 1985
Exams are due by 1 pm Thursday, February 17, 2067.
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.
Hostovsky’s fondness for words and keen ear for spoken language benefit his writing: he can record and create dialogue in a brilliant and natural way. In this respect, he has more in common with short-story writers than with most contemporary poets, who tend to avoid direct speech.
W. H. Auden once said that poets should dress like businessmen. Thom Gunn preferred leather and chains.
These four poets and their recent books are representative of the poetry currently being written in Southwest England and the country more broadly.
Anna Hawkins is an artist who works primarily in moving image and installation with an interest in the ways that images, gestures and language are circulated and transformed online and the impacts of technology on the intimate spheres of daily life.
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.
“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
