136 pages; full-color interior
Dear Reader:
The theme of our twenty-fourth issue is Time, and I find that it’s hard to talk to you about time without sounding trite. I think it’s because, in some ways, we know everything about time. We know that Einstein was right and that time is relativewe feel it in the endlessness of a school year viewed from September by a fourth grader and in the way a child turns eight in the blink of a parent’s eye. We know that Joyce was right and that time doesn’t forgive us for our sins-we feel his warning that “history is a nightmare from which [we are] trying to awake.” We know that the sci-fl writers were right and that time travel changes both everything and nothing.
We know all of this, and yet the sheer volume of what we can’t comprehend about time is staggering. So I invite you to pause from the rush of your day and spend a few hours musing about time with us. Many of the authors in this issue write about how time can heal wounds, how it can help us lose identities and find them again. Many write about the dying of a loved one-the way time slows down in those last breaths over a dry tongue before the clock of the body stops. We will offer you microseconds and vast epochs: the ticking time bomb of a deadly parasite swiftly killing its host, alien scientists examining the slow unfolding of human civilization, the Blockbuster chain chugging to a halt in the strip malls of Middle America. In an exploration of lost time, poet Teri Elam imagines the span of her nephew’s life if he hadn’t died on the day of his birth. She dares to ask whether the tragedy of those lost years is not outweighed by her relief that “God took [him] first” before he could be “distorted as a menace” and possibly killed growing up as a black man in America. “Untiring Machines” by Lindsey Drager reaches back and forth between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries to place a single folktale at two moments that shook the course of human time-the creations of the printing press and the Internet. Author Sam Lipsyte discusses the way time in his novels passes the same way we often experience it in our lives, dilated when we’re in the middle of it and then either “murky” or “fast” when we look back.
After you’ve sat a while with us, turning these pages, you might ask, like Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, who died this year, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” Time is passing, so Oliver asks us: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” She spent hers wandering through fields and looking at grasshoppers, among other things. Just a suggestion.
Cheers,
Elizabeth Blachman
Editor-in-chief
Interviews
(In Order of Appearance)
AUTHORS IN CONVERSATION: ROSALIE KNECHT & IDRA NOVEY by Brian Gresko
ALCY LEYVA by Randy Winston
BEHIND THE BOOK DEAL: JORDY ROSENBERG, VICTORY MATSUI & SUSAN GOLOMB by Liz Mathews
SAM LIPSYTE by Eric Farwell
Fiction
Fiction Editor, Celia Blue Johnson
Associate Fiction Editor, Randy Brown Winston
EMERGING VOICES: PIGEONS by Amani Elkassabany
With an Introduction by Amin Ahmad
NAEGLERIA FOWLERI by Gabriel Urza
THE BULLET: A MULTILINGUAL EXQUISITE CORPSE: Glaydah Namukasa, Ibtisam Azem, Amir Ahmadi Arian, and Silvana Paternostro • Translation by Merit Kabugo, Sinan Antoon, Amir Ahmadi Arian, and Mary Ann Newman
DRAGONFLIES by Shannon Sanders
END OF CONTACT by Alyson Fortowsky
UNTIRING MACHINES by Lindsey Drager
HAPPY RETURNS by Jessica Lee Richardson
Nonfiction
Nonfiction Editor, Maria Gagliano
Associate Nonfiction Editor, Marae Hart
EMERGING VOICES: MUSINGS OF A MIX-UP Cheryl McCourtie
With an Introduction by Margo Jefferson
CLEANSE by Jade Sanchez-Ventura
TIME by Michael Ramos
CLOSING BLOCKBUSTER by Jacob Little
GHETTOPIAN DREAMS: HARLEM 2 HARLEM by Charles Taylor
THE PICTURE-WINDOW FOUNTAIN by Janelle Bassett
Poetry
Poetry Editor, Tom Haushalter
Associate Poetry Editor, Courtney Faye Taylor
EMERGING VOICES: TO SHABAZZ, THE NEPHEW I NEVER MET: JUNE 9, 1990-JUNE 9, 1990 by Teri Elam
With an Introduction by Cate Marvin
ALOFT by Rafael Campo
WHEN BETRAYAL IS THE HUMAN WINDOW WE LOOK THROUGH TO FIND OURSELVES by Chelsea Dingman
FIRE AND TIDAL by Lauren Camp
CONDITIONS OF DEPARTURE by Leah Poole Osowski
SEVENTEEN by David Moolten
MY VISUAL AID IS A TIMELINE by Heather Christle
INDEPENDENCE DAY REUNION, MIDDLE CONCHO RIVER by T. J. McLemore
MUD DAUBER by Laton Carter
ON THE NIGHT MY FATHER DIED by Bernard Ferguson
Visual Art
Art Director, Jennifer K. Beal Davis
Associate Art Director, Matt Davis
(Click Artists’ Names to Visit Their Websites)
CRISTÒFOL PONS cover
