Fall 2022

Contents

From the Editors

Inclusion as Means of Exclusion

What is the purpose of the artist, one might ask? The Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis points out that art isn’t everywhere, and everyone is not an artist. On the contrary, it says, the artist is a singularity, a creature fated to hobble across the world alone, misunderstood, surrounded by people who don’t get it or try to exploit him and by impostors who pretend to be his peers (and who often make it in his stead). The artist is an exception to the rule, to the spectral-structural Umwelt, the one who can tell that there is a rule, and that the rule is wrong. Had it been right, his sheer presence wouldn’t be needed. He'd be living inside art.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) directed by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen

Poetry

carnivorous plants by Eric Adamson
Two by Iain Britton
Three by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Four by Loisa Fenichell
Two by Lesle Lewis
Conversations with the Neighbourhood Girl
by Vanessa Niu
Ocean House by Stephano Pereira
As It Is by David Ruekberg
On How to Be Free in the World
by Jocelyn Ulevicus
Two by Matthew Woodman
***
Excerpts (adapted) by Simone Weil

Flash Fiction

Children of the Sun by Drew Townsend

Interview

Circling the Wound of the Void
In conversation with Diana Khoi Nguyen

Photography

System of Lines and Shadows by Jay Waters

Fine Arts

Paintings by Rika Maja Duevel

Contributors

Eric Adamson is a professor at Hudson County Community College and is a co-founding member of the HCCC Poetry and Language Collective. He loves cartoons, video games, and poetry.

Iain Britton is an Aotearoa New Zealand poet and author of several poetry collections. His work has been nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection. Poems have been published in such magazines as Harvard Review, Poetry, The New York Times, Stand, Agenda, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Prototype, New Humanist. THE INTAGLIO POEMS was published by Hesterglock Press 2017. A new chapbook - Project Constellation - has just been launched by the London publisher Sampson Low.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of 20 books, including the forthcoming Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. He works as a Med Tech and caregiver for folks recovering from traumatic brain injuries.

Loisa Fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been featured or is forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook all these urban fields was published by nothing to say press and her collection Wandering in all directions of this earth is the winner of the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize, selected by Eduardo C. Corral and forthcoming from Ghost Peach Press in 2023. She is the winner of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors' Prize, has been a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 2021 30 Below contest, a runner-up for Tupelo Quarterly's Tupelo Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Dorianne Laux / Joe Millar prize. She has been the recipient of an award from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University, where she holds the Writers’ Scholarship.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In Spring 2022, she was an artist-in-residence at Brown University.

Lesle Lewis’ collections include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014), and Rainy Days on the Farm (Fence Books, 2019). Her chapbook It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. She has had poems appear in many journals including American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire.

Born in Stavanger, Norway, Rika Maja Duevel grew up surrounded by icy fjords and mountains, which impressed on her that there was always a new adventure to be had just around the corner. She carries this thirst for discovery with her as she journeys forward, now leading her to the Netherlands where she has been lucky enough to be granted an atelier in Treehouse, a creative space for artists in multiple disciplines located in the NDSM neighborhood of Amsterdam. You can find out more about Rika's work at www.rikamajaduevel.com or on Instagram: @RikaMajaDuevel.

Vanessa Y. Niu is a fifteen-year-old writer and classically trained singer based in New York City. She frequently travels in search of stalactites in different parts of the world and hopes to study English literature at university later in life. She enjoys indulging her interests in philosophy, literature, ancient mythology and history in her spare time, and can be found writing anywhere, on anything, when it comes to her.

Stephano Pereira is a multimedia artist and writer from South Florida, currently residing in Seattle, WA. He's working on his first novel, an animated series, and has a talking cat.

David Ruekberg (MFA, Warren Wilson) is a poet, teacher, climate activist, and occasional artist in Rochester, NY. He has enjoyed a residency at Jentel Arts, and poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Lake Effect, Mudfish, North American Review, and elsewhere. His previous collections of poetry are Where Is the River Called Pishon? (Kelsay Books, 2018) and Hour of the Green Light (FutureCycle Press, 2021). Read more at https://poetry.ruekberg.com.

Drew Townsend’s inspiration is the land in which he has spent most of his life. His influences are William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, William Gay and Larry Brown to name a few. His work has previously been published in The Curlew, a literary nature journal, and his story “The Outer Edge of Light” was shortlisted for The Cambridge Short Story Prize 2020, and was published online at TSS Publishing. He is also an alumnus of Edinburgh University’s Creative Writing masters.

Jocelyn Ulevicus is an American artist and writer whose work interrogates the transience of being and the hospitality of presence. Her work is either forthcoming or published in magazines such as SWWIM Every Day, The Free State Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Humana Obscura, amongst others. In addition, Ulevicus is a Best Poets 2022 nominee, a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her in-progress memoir, The Birth of a Tree, was shortlisted for the 2019 Santa Fe Literary Award Program. She is currently in Amsterdam, completing research for her first collection of poems.

Jay Waters is a native Alabamian currently in the middle of his third career, teaching full-time in the Advertising and PR Department at the University of Alabama. His photos have appeared in many online and print journals in the US, Canada, UK, and Sweden, including The Lincoln Review, The Arkansas Review, The Wondrous Real, Straight Forward Poetry, The Broken City and Reunion, and The Dallas Review. More at www.jaywatersphotos.com

Street art of S. Weil in Berlin Kreuzberg (2019), Marko Kafé

Simone Weil was a French philosopher and mystic who took part in the French Resistance during World War II. She believed “there is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.”

Matthew Woodman is the founding editor of the journal Rabid Oak and the author of This Is Not Your Moon. He was named the 2022 Kern County Poet Laureate, and his essay on a Rufino Tamayo mural appeared in UNESCO Art Collection: Selected Works, 2021. While he teaches at California State University, Bakersfield, he studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.