Anna Belkovska
At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.
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At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.
the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
I went out to my mailbox. / Everything was addressed to a previous / occupant (twice removed) / who is now, / according to my neighbors / deceased.
At night fish scales and the yellow brilliance of holy figures would glimmer in me.
the future is the raw, then it gets braised in the present, and finally fried to doneness over low heat
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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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