“Here we are all thinking and not thinking about being dead,” Saretta Morgan’s poem in Issue (6) begins, “...[l]eaving room to acknowledge capitalist patriarchy’s broad and coercive applications, // However meager or capacious the desire, our statistics are inevitably abused…”.  It is difficult to think of much else in this current historical moment than the right-wing Israeli government’s ongoing attempt at genocide of the Palestinian people and Hamas’ devastating attack. War crimes, massacres, apartheid, and genocide can and will never have just cause and cannot be mollified by any other name. As practitioners and publishers of writing and literature, we believe it is one of life's deeply and fundamentally expressive forms of thought, feeling, and action. Annulet rejects any militarized contortion of language and rhetoric and the co-optation of grief and anger to legitimize fascism and state-sponsored violence in the project of manufacturing consent for genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Annulet unequivocally opposes Israel's bombing and assault on civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, the violent and incremental occupation of Palestine, and as an online journal based in the U.S., our government and political leaders’ unconscionable escalation and authorization of it. We stand for Palestine with so many across the world who understand these longstanding nuances of tragedy and grief and find the choice to protest settler colonialism and violence an unequivocally clear one. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Annulet also believes that no true solidarity against oppression comes at the expense of any other. Scales of anguish and catastrophe radiate from the single shattered heart to diasporic grief. We also understand both the power and limitation of words, which cannot restore that life which has been so unnecessarily lost. There is no such thing as acceptable attrition of human life, regardless of age or affiliation. We furthermore cannot countenance Western media’s sustained, diabolical dehumanization of Palestinians through what information and voices are censored or banned, and by what is reported and how, from basic description down to syntax and word, and encourage our readers to recognize and speak out against such propaganda and erasure. No one should have to live in fear of retaliation or blacklisting as a consequence. I know my own conscience cannot be at ease now or until there is resolution and reparation for the Palestinian people and all those who have suffered at the structural and individual hands of colonizing power. We stand with other writers, along with literary, academic, publishing, and political organizations who likewise demand a ceasefire, hostage release, sustained access to full humanitarian aid, and an end to occupation. As of November 14th, 2023, we reaffirm our commitment to the guidelines for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, or PACBI, adhering to these principles as an organization, individually, and in editorial practice.

Much of the poetry in Issue (6) charts scenes and sites of entrapment or conditions of physical or political precarity, from Saretta Morgan’s poem from her astonishing new collection Alt-Nature, to Maral Taheri’s brash, feminist subversions (translated by Hajar Hussaini). Annulet is also pleased to feature six excerpts from Milo Wipperman’s Joan of Arkansas, whose reconfiguration of the famous Joan of Arc myth transposes latent (inquisitions) and extant (internet) political aggression toward queer, rural life with chilling accuracy. Andrew Cantrell’s poem “Afterdamp” speaks in damaged afterlives of coal miners: “There we have daily died before our deaths and daily thereafter we continue to die / of the certainty of accident / in the margins of acceptable loss / of our imagined and in our imagined calamity / and alone.” Brandon Shimoda traces, with finest spiritual attunement, the spatiality and lingering tragedy of Hiroshima in his five poems from “Rest House:” “I took my time   walking around / the abandoned, blown out house // where the mushroom cloud climbed // to heaven   reluctantly  / blushing.” In Patty Nash’s poetry included in Issue (6), the pained ironies and moral failures of contemporary life and its preconditions are probed with skill and candor, from two “propositions” which appropriate Martin Luther’s form of 95 theses, to “Lübeck,” a sonic/sonnet crown. I’ll include the shortest of her five poems, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” here, for its damning vision and political resonance:

If something horrible's normal
Even great minds will struggle with it

Clutch their trembling hand
The other clutching the feather

That's not just any feather, however
It's John Hancock's

A Founding Father’s
Vengeful feather

Hovering over the dead goose
It was plucked from

Issue (6)’s literary criticism includes Jessica Reed’s appreciations of Jorie Graham’s two recent poetry collections as consistent with her signature “acrobatic detours and excursions on the page” in their diagnoses and expansions to accommodate sinister parameters, or the ends, of virtual life alongside the poet’s own. Tori McCandless reads closely and expansively with Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Bucks County; so too does Jennifer Valdies interbraid lyrical remembrance of her grandmother and family home with the reading experience of Angel Dominguez’s RoseSunWater. Likewise, Isaac Pickell’s intimate reading of Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes reminds me that one’s own reading mind is alive with memory and relation, even as you’re reading someone else’s. Issue (6)’s annulets include the rigorously zany (Henry Goldkamp on Bob Kaufman) and attention to translation’s speculative accumulations (David Berridge on Amalie Smith and Anna K. Winder). Comparatives range from Diana Leca’s ingenious study of the eeriness of N.H. Pritchard’s short, sonic poems to Joshua Wilkerson’s adroit assessment of Jeremy Hoevanaar through Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Judith Balso. This is just to say that Issue (6) has a generous apportionment of essays for you to engage, which I couldn’t possibly recount fairly in this note. Further, Annulet is excited to publish what we believe is a previously untranslated novella by the nineteenth-century writer Adalbert Stifter, beloved by writers like W.G. Sebald, now translated by Aimee Chor. I am also grateful to Merrill Gilfillan for sharing a poem that rounds out the issue. Such variety confirms our range and informed heterogeneity of approaches, styles, traditions, and and poetics for which I believe Annulet is known and valued.

Additionally, Annulet invites you to join us for our inaugural Linkages Lectures, which will be delivered by Éireann Lorsung on November 19th and December 10th, 2023, at 2:00 p.m. EST on Zoom. Her talks are titled “When you get someplace new, learn to read the landscape like an alphabet” and “On the line.” You can find complete information, including how to sign up to receive the links to each lecture, here. And in case you can’t make one or both, we will  publish both lectures’ text in our next issue, coming in the spring.

It has been surreal to experience personal loss amidst historical tragedy. In preparation of this issue, I lost my beloved father, Barry Wright III, to a totally unexpected heart attack. He never wavered in his support of my efforts as an editor, scholar, and poet, even as my interests and politics diverged radically from his own. My ongoing work commemorates his love and memory, and how unspeakably much I miss him. I thank all the contributors who so graciously worked to meet a consequently much shorter revision deadline for this latest issue to appear on its originally scheduled publication date. As I assembled the final details of Issue (6) amidst this unmooring, I thought of how my dad would often remind me in his pithy fashion, when I would call him for reassurance, distressed and overwhelmed: “One thing at a time.” Those words got me through, and perhaps they will help you, too.

Holding fast in a dark hour,

Alicia Wright
Editor