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.
True darkness is in a child’s bedroom. Deep black. Elsewhere there’s just a meager, watery twilight, in which everything, in the end, acquires a humiliating distinctness.
My body is a shallow mound, is how her most famous poem began. She had written it when she was the same age as the young man who was sitting opposite her now, wanting to interview her.
The autocrat draws a large crowd for his speech. He begins to speak but no words come out.
Calling this city my home / is a weighty dream I cannot cast aside / or let them haul away.
Little kisses have a way of growing / into big penises, said the grandmother / on prom night. Little leaks sink a ship / yelled the captain, seawater on his lips.
The sun was high, and it was like the air wanted to have sex with you. Looking down I could see him slowly make his way along the street, stopping to say hello to someone, a man waiting with an old style hat …
I was in the madhouse I’m going to be in the madhouse I am in the madhouse everyone is / I write to keep the train on course to crush me / it’ll happen on a morning no less beautiful than this
At the opposite bank a barge rolls the river under itself. / We are not approaching our end, / but from ultimate emptiness / the end is hurtling towards us.
When I regained my faith in poetry, I started writing prose. Concept was my totemic operator. I amassed trophies of species on the brink of extinction and smuggled rare genera across borders to inlay my texts with them.
I used to be a woman who cried / over the useless bastards. / Boo-hoo, I said, filling my hanky, // boo-hoo over the useless bastards. / It is too bad we can’t see ourselves / in our own silliness …
I remember a day in Houston, in the death / throes of summer, a young man nailing / a live swan to a tree in the posture / of the Christ in an argument with beauty.
Each month comes the reminder / of the gash God made in me. / I like to think He made it / with one finger, the way an artist / will reach right into a painting / and finish it off.
Once I wrote a remarkable fairy tale and decided to take it to Little Trolley, a children’s gazette. I walked into the editorial office, and sitting right there on the table was the editor, thoughtfully gazing at the ceiling.
“Just think,” he was musing to himself, “how much free space that ceiling has. You could put a couch there, or a couple of armchairs, or even a television.”
I crisscross the stacks / searching for my mother / and father. The librarian / tells me they boarded / the other plane / that already took off. / This library is an airplane / I do not want to be on / but the doors are locked / and in fact / the librarian states, / we too have taken off.
In my village, I’m the fool. / Sad dogs know me – sad white school / of sleepy dogs that drift away /
into the distance.
True darkness is in a child’s bedroom. Deep black. Elsewhere there’s just a meager, watery twilight, in which everything, in the end, acquires a humiliating distinctness.
The autocrat draws a large crowd for his speech. He begins to speak but no words come out.
Calling this city my home / is a weighty dream I cannot cast aside / or let them haul away.
Little kisses have a way of growing / into big penises, said the grandmother / on prom night. Little leaks sink a ship / yelled the captain, seawater on his lips.
The sun was high, and it was like the air wanted to have sex with you. Looking down I could see him slowly make his way along the street, stopping to say hello to someone, a man waiting with an old style hat …
My body is a shallow mound, is how her most famous poem began. She had written it when she was the same age as the young man who was sitting opposite her now, wanting to interview her.
Christian Dior, in his Little Dictionary of Fashion maintains that “if you have a particularly outstanding feature it is always a good thing to emphasise it. In fact the whole of fashion rests largely on emphasis.”
The teacher swung his arm to strike her once more, but it remained in mid-air, as if petrified. A blue children’s watch was engraved on his skin. And with every tick the clasp sank deeper into his flesh. They could not get it off without cutting.
It contained the body of a roughly four-year-old boy. That in itself is astounding, since we’re talking about a time frame of about twenty-four thousand years ago …
I discovered a lot of secrets, a lot of combinations, dark, political, religious, ideological, personal, to do with chess; spying, double and triple secret agents from all camps, secret police involved in dirty activities.
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.
“There is little financial reward in publishing poetry but a great deal of satisfaction” – Rob A. Mackenzie on the origins and history of Blue Diode Press
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.
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.
One is immediately taken by the ethereal and symbolically rich nature of his work. His approach to drawing is so unique that in person it is difficult to tell what medium he is working in.
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