By SARAH CARSON
Genessee County, Michigan
On the night hike through what Wikipedia calls the picturesque 383-acres of the For-Mar Nature Preserve and Arboretum, a man in ISO rated cold-weather cargo pants plays barred owl calls from YouTube, then recruits a kid with a headlamp to hold a Bluetooth speaker to a dogwood tree. I imagine the owls shake their heads in their hollow, that somewhere else in the dark of fallen branches, salamanders yawn, a doe wishes her fawn would settle.
By YUNHAN FANG
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By the summer of 2009, I found I was thinking less and less about the Wenchuan earthquake the year prior, in which 87,000 people had died, my father among them. That year, on the day of Xiazhi, I met a girl called Thirteen. We spent the night together, having sex and talking until the sky turned the color of moonstone.
ANI GJIKA’S An Unruled Body won the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and has been longlisted for the 2024 Mass Book Awards in Nonfiction. In this interview, Ani Gjika and poet and translator RACHEL MORGENSTERN-CLARREN delve into the profound influence of language and literature, particularly in the context of women’s liberation. They explore the pivotal role of books and language in empowering women, and shed light on the transformative and essential nature of literary expression in combating censorship, serving as a form of healing after traumatic experiences, and offering a new language to write about and confront the past.
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Susana Praver-Pérez’s work, moving fluidly between English and Spanish, from Puerto Rico to California and New York, is a moving meditation on how place shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. Praver-Pérez’s debut collection Hurricanes, Love Affairs, and Other Disasters, and recent collection, Return Against the Flow, reckon with how we make a place home, considering with care and generosity the landscape of Puerto Rico and its impact on her selfhood. In lyrical, narrative poems, Praver-Pérez examines how geography is defined by its landscape and people. Through the narrativization of lived experience and the intertextual poetry of others, Praver-Pérez’s collection, Return Against the Flow is a necessary documentation of the way language shifts across landscape and time.
In this interview, VIKA MUJUMDAR and SUSANA PRAVER-PÉREZ discuss place and geography, the shifting influences of language, and the transitory nature of diasporic belonging.
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