Latvian Lit Week

Latvian Lit Week

Poetry by Inga Pizāne, Semyon Khanin, Anna Belkovska. Fiction by Jānis Joņevs. Translated by Jayde Will, Kaija Straumanis, Kevin M. F. Platt, Anton Tenser, Sasha Spektor, and Daniil Cherkassky.

Anna Belkovska

Anna Belkovska

At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.

Semyon Khanin

Semyon Khanin

the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat

Jānis Joņevs

Jānis Joņevs

How nice it was not knowing anything, except that what you were doing was important. To know that your daily actions contained some kind of hidden power. They believed that their work would contribute to the unified, inescapable, and impending victory.

Inga Pizāne

Inga Pizāne

You get used to everything. / To contemporary dance and poetry. / To Bukowski, who drinks and fucks in every third poem / and sends everyone to hell.

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Latvian Lit Week

Jānis Joņevs

How nice it was not knowing anything, except that what you were doing was important. To know that your daily actions contained some kind of hidden power. They believed that their work would contribute to the unified, inescapable, and impending victory.

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Inga Pizāne

You get used to everything. / To contemporary dance and poetry. / To Bukowski, who drinks and fucks in every third poem / and sends everyone to hell.

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Nick Demske

Lil’ B is the perfect example of a highly functioning retard. I’m mad he fucked my grandma, dumped her in a forest and then stole her jewelry. He’s making his bread and butter off coonery. Let that boy grandma cook.

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Alvaro Bisama

We’d be down in the port at the Hesperia café, 8:30 in the morning. Talking about whatever. She’d be chain-smoking, and I would shred the skin of my lips with my teeth. Those nervous habits were all we had left in those days …

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Tony Gloeggler

I don’t want to put him on the spot / and I know I’d think less of him / if he gave the wrong answer. Instead, / I name names in my head, a long list / of friends who would have let me die.

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R. A. Allen

I went out to my mailbox. / Everything was addressed to a previous / occupant (twice removed) / who is now, / according to my neighbors / deceased.

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Latvian Lit

Anna Belkovska

At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.

Semyon Khanin

the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat

Inga Pizāne

You get used to everything. / To contemporary dance and poetry. / To Bukowski, who drinks and fucks in every third poem / and sends everyone to hell.

Petr Hruška

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.

Jeff Friedman

The autocrat draws a large crowd for his speech. He begins to speak but no words come out.

Jānis Joņevs

How nice it was not knowing anything, except that what you were doing was important. To know that your daily actions contained some kind of hidden power. They believed that their work would contribute to the unified, inescapable, and impending victory.

Bianca Bellová. Photo by Jan Trnka

Bianca Bellová

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.

Gaurav Monga

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.”

Marijana Čanak

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.

Lukáš Cabala

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 …

Siegfried Mortkowitz

Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.

Marina Porras

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.

Blue Diode Press | Publisher’s Story

“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

Favorites from the Last 10 Years, Selected by Michael Stein

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.

Favorites from the Last 10 Years, Selected by Stephan Delbos

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.

Favorites from the Last 10 Years, Selected by Joshua Mensch

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.

Favorites from the Last 10 Years, Selected by Jan Zikmund

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.

Art

Michelle Sylliboy

Interview with L’nu interdisciplinary artist Michelle Sylliboy

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.

Andy Van Dinh

Interview with artist Andy Van Dinh

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.