The Spring Issue | 2024
Our Spring 2024 issue is packed with poems, stories, and art from around the world and we hope you enjoy the pieces we’ve selected as much as we enjoyed selecting them.
W. H. Auden once said that poets should dress like businessmen. Thom Gunn preferred leather and chains.
And because I was not good, I did not step inside / the ark. The flood came and went and my body, // in rebuke of the enemy, became one with ground.
What is there / but great silence, waiting, / and serving time in the body / before returning home
We called it chemo brain—forgetting the names / of people, places, familiar objects
At the theater we recognize the movie is us. / All kinds of awful things are happening. / The ocean has covered houses so they barely stick out / like broken teeth.
Our Spring 2024 issue is packed with poems, stories, and art from around the world and we hope you enjoy the pieces we’ve selected as much as we enjoyed selecting them.
When they call her name, he kisses her, and she tastes his salty lips. The nurse, unsmiling in her brisk white uniform, leads her into an examining room.
I’m five years old / again, refusing to wear Bermuda / shorts, begging mom to buy only / long pants, long enough to hide / my iron brace
And because I was not good, I did not step inside / the ark. The flood came and went and my body, // in rebuke
What is there / but great silence, waiting, / and serving time in the body / before returning home
We called it chemo brain—forgetting the names / of people, places, familiar objects
Philosophy of Life 101
Summer 1985
Exams are due by 1 pm Thursday, February 17, 2067.
When they call her name, he kisses her, and she tastes his salty lips. The nurse, unsmiling in her brisk white uniform, leads her into
You must think that I am handling this poorly. My sister taught me that, too: how grief seizes us, paralyzes, renders us speechless and seemingly
I have never had a particularly good imagination. Really, it’s kind of dire. It irritates my wife that I can’t imagine a future. I’m not
The fire on the American mountainside was dying down. My thought was that horror cannot be cheated if hope is to become believable.
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.
Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors
From her earliest work — before the idea of eco-entanglement was widely adopted by poets — Arnold viewed nature not as an ‘object’ or ‘other’ but as an inextricable (and clearly endangered) system in which humanity participates.
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.
Weaving together disparate references spanning across histories and geographies, German interdisciplinary artist Johanna Strobel explores the entanglement between philosophy, semiotics, and actuality.
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.
“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.
© 2024 | B O D Y | bodyliterature.com