Usually, the six months between Annulet’s two issues a year is long enough that a contextualizing prefatory note from me feels useful. But as we catch up to the more regular issue schedule, I’m occasioned to put something forward on the notion of what’s happened, what’s taken place, a little sooner than I ordinarily would. Even in the few months since our double issue in February, some things will have changed—culture’s fluctuations and flows, Zohran’s fully suited swimming pool leap, zucchini flowering and fruiting in my small back garden; some things, like genocide, war and destruction, and the erosion of U.S. and international civil and human rights, remain ongoing. Heat domes, like hauntings from the distant saurian past and brutal alien future, slowly fill the air. Meanwhile, and, during, despite—activisms both visibly and invisibly shape our lives, make meaning and meaningful difference. To believe in mutual aid in the present is to trust in negative capability. We take time for caretaking, for letting things slide, for thinking, for despairing lulls, scrolling and waiting, for the sweat of action, for holding to what stability we might have, for sharing resources as we must. There’s not a lot of salvific anything to pass around—except for the glow and alacrity of our own intelligences. Let me be clear that I don’t think my own American uncertainty, however much current policies delimit my life and happiness, is either a singular canary or even a significant bellwether. I do, however, think that an issue of a literary journal, however small its audience, becomes an experiential index, an amalgamation of plural thought and feeling, a collective form of potential that contemporary writers and readers choose over the platform post. While I’d lately considered that it might be necessary for Annulet to take refuge from AI in print, counting on (smugly, my mistake) illiteracy and ignorance, it is clear that even small print publications are evidently important enough for life and death legal decisions. Not since the McCarthy era has both the vitality and vulnerability of small press and zine publishing been as grossly weaponized as in the sentencing of Elizabeth and Ines Soto, among other book club participants and defendants in the Prairieland, Texas case. There is no doubt that we are living in another Red Scare, atomized and bent, but we are all the more connected and aware.

In this issue of Annulet, Tiffany Troy contributes “The Brightest Moon,” a lyrical engagement with the poetries of first and second-generation immigrants of color, to “American Poetry and Poetics, 2008–2025,” our now ongoing forum. I’m pleased to share that the first essay in our Annuals pamphlet series, which also appears here in Issue (11), is “Dynamic Equilibrium: What Muriel Rukeyser knows about poetry” by Stefania Heim, alongside several other wonderfully dynamic essays that I wish I had the money to also print. Chi Le, Jack Chelgren, Abbey Frederick, and Noah Warren contribute lapidary annulets—the latter on Zach Peckham, whose work as the publisher of Community Mausoleum is insightfully celebrated by Kamden Ishmael Hilliard. Aiden Farrell reviews Ariel Yelen’s I Was Working, digging deep into its interrogations of labor and productivity. “How porous the barrier between equity and debt / at the risk of repeating itself the scroll unrolls / before you” begins Sylvia Jones in her poem “Before You Arrive.” basalt hsu asks and answers in their sequence “Casting the Lot,”

SO IF NOT SEASICKNESS THEN WHAT IS DANGEROUS OUT ON

HIGH SEAS?

                                Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing
                    Let us repeat this chaotically:
                                            It is huge and grows bigger
                                                        every day

Militaristic power hovers in this issue’s imaginary: “we cohallucinate the mothermind,” writes Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué in “Your Raygun.” And Gillian Conoley, a poet and editor who I have long looked up to, reminds us of poetry’s potency in this conclusion from her poem “War 3”—

If today you die         If tomorrow brings lyric


if lyric is new fossil


we have the energy

Speaking of collective energy, contributing editor Toby Altman is receiving entries for our current CFP, “What Kind of Poetry World Should We Have?” through July 1st, but if you’d like to write something beyond that date, feel free to inquire with us about it. I have been both grateful for and surprised by the reaction to this invitation, and Annulet welcomes both contribution and critique of the principles and questions we set in our call for community engagement.

If you’d like to read a sneak peek of this upcoming folio, I’m sharing the remarks I presented for our panel of the same name at this year’s New Orleans Poetry Festival below. My subject, unsurprisingly, was the role of literary journals in this wide-ranging conversation about the “poetry world.” It feels perhaps a little internecine even now compared to April, but regardless, my hope is that it leaves no uncertainty about my values or beliefs concerning how I practice literary production.


Alongside in the heat,

Alicia Wright
Editor, Annulet




Agentic and Anarchic


In his essay “In Love and Rage: The Revolutionary Counter-Mood of Zine Culture,” Tavia Nyong’o, detailing the connection between punk aesthetics and zine culture, says: “The ephemeral evidence of zines establishes an anti-systemic ‘counter-archive’ of protest...and offers a road map with which to escape oppression—for all who are brave or desperate enough to find and follow it.” Concerned mostly with the survival methods of both Black and queer culture, particularly through publishing and pedagogy, Nyong’o, among other things, emphasizes analogue transmission—“the weird, the queer, the old-fashioned, and the handmade”—as a “stew of punk attitude” for a “trans-revolutionary counter-mood” from which the work of rethinking the reading and writing experience toward the utopic, or a world emancipated, begins with dreams and practices of literary activity.

And while I’m here in these few minutes to present some thoughts about the literary journal—a comparatively more hifalutin form than the zine—I’d like to think first about these forms of collective expressions as closer in response and circumstance than not, as to categorically apply a distinction along material lines would be, in a certain light, to reinforce the class structure that’s both entrenched and familiar to us in literary culture, to follow the lines of prestige economy (to stoke the useful embers of previous poetics conflicts gone by). Conversations about books and their economies scale quickly and have different implications. Literary magazines foster and foment. (I’m not afraid of “the literary,” especially not when I’m in the habit of prising excellence out of the prestige economy’s grip.) Journals are a form and a formula for alignment and expression of both the social and aesthetic channels of contemporary writing. And at the same time, what we have in 2026 is a literary culture that continues to reproduce class values in accordance with affinity, prestige, and capital.

The literary journal, magazine, zine, occupies an intriguing syncretic role, mediating between the unformed and the object, resulting in, however accidentally or intentionally, the cultivation of cultural capital. The literary journal, the zine, emerges from the abyss and rides the dark waves. It’s weird that both the institutional and post-institutional turn in literary studies’ theorizing of the present’s multimodal, multidisciplinary literary situation misses literary journals entirely. It would be worthwhile, but perhaps not as grand a project than usually attracts such attention, to attend to the role of literary journal as the primary example of contemporary literary production. It is at once a meeting point for small press sociology and part of the formula for making literary-cultural capital, and whose operative praxes pose questions about the co-creative role of the editor and the materials they use to produce the literary object in both print and online contexts. It is the confluence of agentic practices—the writer’s, the editor’s, and becomes a collective expression once all these elements are assembled that persist without regard for commercial pressure. I’d like to point out, as a reminder, that we already have a model not just for pluralism, not just for organization, but for de-growth as much as cultivation of both our political and aesthetic present in our hands through what the literary journal does and can do. Their forms of affiliation and values dramatize, often in self-conscious play or intervention, the relationship between the commodified object containing unruly writing and the regulations and standards of print production. The politics of literary journals are at once established, emergent, and evident, but it is difficult to see these organized expressions through the haze of prestige, the driving compulsion to monetize. An editor can be either generous or miserly about it.

A journal can puncture, and punctuate, these logics of affiliation and organization, and not just in a rude or splashy way. It asks and offers the opportunity to step away, stand aside, stand with. It is a frame, a retooling, a setting of work in light in a net of collective expression. An agile assembly, assemblage.

In their expanding archives—indeed, their archives are temporal projects of chronicling—each issue adds, reactivates, the work that has come before it, just as it anticipates the work that will appear in it in the future. These traditions are legible; we do not have to reinvent the wheel with every publishing act. In the literary world, we are often left to negotiate the compromises and concessions of our interactions and imbrications with academic or nonprofit institutions, and independent literary journals, already divested, act as countermoves to these structural flows and economic failures.

Though we are in a moment in which many of the original surviving journals from the twentieth century’s publication boom are by now Baby Boomers themselves, with familiar names and histories long and getting longer, I refuse the idea that longevity must mean aesthetic calcification, invisibility, or devaluation. Just the same, a literary journal is and cannot be a brand. It is composite and composed. It is an aggregate being that works to synthesize but never to assimilate. And also by way of this aggregate nature, literary journals act as antidotes to machine-driven writing that’s stripped of its human, and subsequently its political, viability. The literary journal, both in print and online, is the site where we can best see the literary world organizing itself. The future of writing in the U.S. begins with this essential form’s foundational, heterogenous, and de-institutionalizing work: a return, in a sense, to a dependence on ritual.