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poetry

contributors

editorial

We envisioned this issue around the prose poem. A few months ago we made an open call and were surprised by the diversity of submissions we received, some from very respected international poets. Others from different and unexpected places, edgy and original. The poems in this issue are what we selected. 

Breathlessly nimble, Alvin Pang’s prose poems set memories, language and the urban landscape hurtling towards each other to collide in unexpected ways.

Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poems resemble the dramatic monologue. It is self-conscious that it “isn’t even a poem, or even an apology for a poem,” foregrounding the tension within the form of the prose-poem.

The American Bengali poet, Aryanil Mukherjee, discusses the anti-dramatic, anti-lyrical legacies of the prose poem in Bengali with Souradeep Roy.

Carol D’Souza’s poem is a delicate mapping of “detail and canvas” into one poem that resembles a portrait. 

Constantin Acosmei’s poems — translated by Gene Tanta — use the prose-poem to build up cataclysm and, simultaneously, bring out the form’s potential to strip a traditional cataclysmic Biblical story to its bare necessities.

From Harryette Mullen, sharp, compressed poems on our earth, bringing us to the edge where we are hovering now.

Irwin Allan Sealy’s poem flutters between an invitation, a prayer and a plea.

Placing itself in the very instance of Fernando Pessoa's birth and death, Jay Gao's poem soars above the known and the plausible to gain access into the granular whirlwind of history.   

Words and animals cruise along the edge of poetry and prose in Luisa Futoransky’s poems. 

M.P. Pratheesh's prose poems offer us a world without edges, where everything is radically adjacent and yet nothing leaves its place.

Mantra Mukim’s poem plumbs a peculiar form of interstellar intimacy.

Anand’s prose poems pointedly interrogate the restorative power and the troubling ambiguities of art made in a deeply unequal world.

In Smitha Sehgal’s poems inhabit a world where objects and words flow into each other like ink from a pen.

Sharmistha Mohanty’s poem plots a relationship between the two faces, feral and tamed, shadowed by an attendant gaze.

Todd Swift brings a disarming wryness to the prose poem form.