On the island of Saaremaa I would have been considered a beautiful bride. No / shame there for size ten feet and thick calves wide thighs and no wonder.
I am a coward, / even in the service of exposing kids / to beauty
Someone shouts There’s a fucking kid shot in the head. / After your death, from Belfast to Florida, your face / on murals. They say Lyra lives on. But that’s a lie.
It’s been a long, hot summer here in Prague. We’d rather be sitting in a cool lake than in an office, but at least we can submerge ourselves in great writing. This issue marks B O D Y’s 10th Anniversary, and we’re grateful to have made it this far — thanks to you, our readers. Herewith, we present the best poems and stories that came our way since the last issue, along with a few of our favorites from the past ten years. As usual, we’ll be rolling out our Summer Issue over the next four weeks or so, so check back daily for great new writing.
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.
Someone shouts There’s a fucking kid shot in the head. / After your death, from Belfast to Florida, your face / on murals. They say Lyra lives on. But that’s a lie.
It’s been a long, hot summer here in Prague. We’d rather be sitting in a cool lake than in an office, but at least we can submerge ourselves in great writing. This issue marks B O D Y’s 10th Anniversary, and we’re grateful to have made it this far — thanks to you, our readers. Herewith, we present the best poems and stories that came our way since the last issue, along with a few of our favorites from the past ten years. As usual, we’ll be rolling out our Summer Issue over the next four weeks or so, so check back daily for great new writing.
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.
I lived upon this earth in such an age / when man was so debased he sought to murder / for pleasure, not just to comply with orders
I got home late once, tired, / and sat down by his bedside. / You must be hungry, he said. / A magnificent sentence like that, / the last I remember him saying.
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.
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 …
Someone shouts There’s a fucking kid shot in the head. / After your death, from Belfast to Florida, your face / on murals. They say Lyra lives on. But that’s a lie.
I was the last place on the planet / where astronauts slept / my last customers were the planet’s / last people
“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.”
Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?
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.
One of those things most difficult to convey about the special conditions in which we lived was the visegradišag: that everything, buying bread, recycling, riding the tram, came with a surreal associated cost that was impossible to anticipate …
For a moment, she wondered where all dead birds go when they die, which probably happens every minute of every hour, so really, birds should be falling from the sky not just from time to time, but raining down constantly …
A girl boarded the train. Actually, she was no longer a girl, because she was about thirty. But there was something in her behaviour and her appearance which suggested that, body aside, she was still a girl.
Vratislav Kadlec’s short story collection Hranice lesa (The Forest Boundary), from which this piece was taken, received the Magnesia Litera Award.
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
Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous writers of the 20th century. Read about why his short story, “The Pedestrian”, is still so important today.
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.
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.
“I had a very standard, Americanized education in Hawaii. I didn’t know how to recognize or understand the ways colonialism connected Hawaii to the rest of the world.”
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