Welcome to our Spring 2023 issue. We’re delighted to bring you incredible new poems and short fiction from all across Europe and North America, both English and translated works, plus some brilliant essays and interviews. Featuring new writing from voices both new and familiar, our Spring Issue treats spring for what it is: a time for hope, new growth, and sudden awakenings.
I was born a feral beast.
At the time of my birth, I tore my mother apart. It wasn’t on purpose. I think the circumstances caused it. There was a lot of blood in the hospital room.
My father, who gutted animals as part of his occupation, couldn’t bear to look.
He needed two dark beers and two shots of liquor to quiet the horror inside him.
I cut the line, honk my horn, chew with a full mouth, / then burp. The piercings in my ears have closed, / my heart has closed. And my clothes? I’ve stopped / doing laundry.”
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.
This Radha, unlike the one I spend most of my waking life with, drives a car with impeccable accuracy, almost as if she has eyes at the back of her head. This Radha, though cold and calculating, has been having sex with many men behind my back.
I cut the line, honk my horn, chew with a full mouth, / then burp. The piercings in my ears have closed, / my heart has closed. And my clothes? I’ve stopped / doing laundry.”
This Radha, unlike the one I spend most of my waking life with, drives a car with impeccable accuracy, almost as if she has eyes at the back of her head. This Radha, though cold and calculating, has been having sex with many men behind my back.
I imagine you were born / a breathless fish. // And they saved you.
There’s something grounding about a god who knows his place. Yet there’s something terrifying about a god who knows how to bring us down with him.
Husbands are not so hard to make: / my father is three microwaves / stacked on top of each other.
I was born a feral beast.
At the time of my birth, I tore my mother apart. It wasn’t on purpose. I think the circumstances caused it. There was a lot of blood in the hospital room.
My father, who gutted animals as part of his occupation, couldn’t bear to look.
He needed two dark beers and two shots of liquor to quiet the horror inside him.
This Radha, unlike the one I spend most of my waking life with, drives a car with impeccable accuracy, almost as if she has eyes at the back of her head. This Radha, though cold and calculating, has been having sex with many men behind my back.
The screaming could be heard in the outside corridor, someone had moved house out of me, never to return.
When Jack Mendenhall returns from Vietnam, Wendy thinks she is interested. She likes tough boys with swagger, dirty mouths, and nasty imaginations.
We drove through the dark landscape. We wanted to get there before darkness fell, but dusk was already spreading over the area—earlier here than elsewhere.
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.
Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.
They are women who want to look into the mirror and be satisfied with their reflection. Envy is born when you look into the mirror and don’t like what you see there. Everything about this sin begins with the eyes.
Andrew J. Moorhouse of Fine Press Poetry talks about what brought him to the life-changing decision to establish the press.
You either believe Kent Johnson exists or he doesn’t. Neither is true. In his poems, translations, conceptual acts anchored on the page, Kent Johnson is there and not there.
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.
If there is a common denominator among the translated fiction published in B O D Y, it is work that maintains a precarious yet exhilarating balance between wild flights of imagination, unbridled humor and grappling with an often harsh reality. Read my favorites here.
Publishing writing you love is the greatest pleasure of editing a literary journal. It’s hard to believe B O D Y has been around for 10 years and I’m astounded by the quality and variety of writing in our archives. Herewith some of my favorites.
It has been an enormous privilege to edit this magazine and I’m astounded by the sheer volume of great writing we’ve been entrusted with over the past ten years. The poems, stories, and essays in this selection represent, to me, what this project has really been about since the beginning: discovering great new writing.
B O D Y, through its ties with translators, has always given space to intriguing voices from the past. When selecting my favourites on the occasion of the magazine’s ten-year anniversary, it seemed fitting to highlight three deceased poets – a Hungarian, Czech, and Russian – that deserve more attention.
“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.
David Biespiel is the author of six volumes of poetry, two memoirs, two essay collections, and is the editor of two anthologies of poetry.
Francesca Bell interviews German poet Max Sessner about his work, some of his thoughts on poetry and his upcoming book of poems, Das Wasser von Gestern.
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.
Atomic Culture is a curatorial platform founded by Mateo Galindo and Malinda Galindo. They collaborate with artists on site-specific projects that reimagine the outlook of our cities.
Eleanor King is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation art that responds to our physical, social, and economic landscapes.
Khari Johnson-Ricks is a New Jersey-based artist and DJ who paints, makes zines, and videos. Jessica Mensch caught up with him to talk about his art.
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