Image: Hung-Chi Chen, 耽溺與背叛 "Addict and Betrayer." 2015, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 100×100 cm
Welcome to our twelfth annual Queer issue. The characters in these seven pieces reflect on the past and pursue the future, reckoning with loss and confronting desires established and new. Wanning Chen transcribes the memories of a Taiwanese butch lesbian, and Li Kotomi depicts an alienated preteen mourning the loss of a classmate and a connection. Olivia M. Coetzee’s trans woman watches street traffic and considers the lives intersecting with hers. Nina Bouraoui channels the roiling thoughts of a runaway wife and mother. Javier Stanziola's protagonist reads a life-changing letter, and Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin looks back at life and love. And Fahmi Mustaffa’s young Malaysian in Amsterdam navigates an unexpected detour.
Reckonings: The Queer Issue XII
This year we celebrate Pride Month with seven pieces depicting Queer characters confronting decisive moments.
Yun-Fan: Singing the Variety of Queer Life
"When I was twenty-three, I met my first girlfriend, who then went off with a man after just four months—and eventually married him."
A Night in Timimoun
It's your skin I feel sliding beneath my soapy palms.
In the Shadows
The rhythmic flow of Shadow Heights was something she often missed and longed for while she was in Joburg.
Gustavo
My departure had nothing to do with you or your brother.
Cereté, Córdoba
I love you all even more in exile
Solo Dance
From that day on, her memories of Danchen were frozen.
Theo
I'm not like you, Pak.
Book Reviews
A Pioneer of Decolonial Poetry, Jorgenrique Adoum Finally Gets His Book-length (Post)English Debut
Reviewed by Olivia Lott
Linguistic experimentation and political rebellion went hand in hand in the work of the Ecuadorian Adoum, a leading figure of the Latin American neo-avant-garde who wrote his verses in what he called "postspanish."
“The Scar We Know” Shows How Lida Yusupova Shaped Russian Feminist Poetry
Reviewed by Josephine von Zitzewitz
With an unflinching gaze at physical and sexual violence, abundant profanity and a disregard for meter and rhyme, the poems in this collection expose the gruesome routine of gender hierarchy in a society that has turned the shoring up of patriarchal structures into government policy.
In the Stories of Kjell Askildsen, Stasis and Revelation Intertwine
Reviewed by Ben Goldman
The narratives of "Everything Like Before," only the second book by the Norwegian writer to be published in the US, bend toward the seemingly mundane, then sting with an act that might (or might not) change everything.