Editorial
Welcome to Issue 18 of Almost Island:
Nathaniel Mackey’s “late syntactic study”, the 217th section of a kind of twin poem he has been developing for more than thirty-eight years, glimpses for us this master of world poetry at the height of powers. We’re now deep into the binding, into the later books of So. The local time may happen to be just after yet another stolen election, in the newly re-christened
“United Slave States of Nub” to boot; but by contrast, Mackey’s weave and warp of body and soul offers us the other worlds as well, decisively renews and reminds us of countless realms of continual and parallel possibility — “all preface or prolegomenon should we finish, all afterword should we not.”
In Sea Birth See Day, Jeffrey Yang pays homage and salutes a great living translator, scholar, mentor, revealer of “unreal cities” and “instigator at the crag’s edge”.
Critically re-reading Muktibodh’s एक अरूप शून्य के प्रति (“To a Formless Void”) for today’s geist, Aditya Bahl takes the maximum pressure of the language — not least the blackout on questions of labour, and the questions it makes for our poetics.
Nisha Ramayya taps and pays tribute to the greatness of Alice Coltrane in tracks like Going Home and Govinda Jai Jai.
Aleš Šteger’s prose poems, deftly translated here from the Slovenian by Brian Henry, stray with an astonishing seriousness of purpose, from the real to the unknown and back, from the dead right hand to the living left one, to the angels hidden in the art.
Walking the streets of Bangalore, working often with the minutest of particulars, Anjum Hasan assembles a tribute with infinitely moving parts, proving that the greatness of a city depends, ultimately, on the force of attention we can bring to it.
Anand Thakore seeks out, with the truth of his heart, the precise “distance at which cities are forgiven”, the exact distance at which one is both the reader and the one being read.
Mourning the death of a friend in our age of inexplicable crassness, Todd Swift explores the troubled waters of sin and redemption, in a poetry, “doubly fallen”— “informed by experience but made of language”.
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– Almost Island Team