Every hour that has passed in the six months since my previous note is an hour in which the ongoing genocide could have been ended. And every hour that passes in which it continues, part of our human nature is lost to the unappeasable, brutal logic of empire, a continuation of now centuries’ wars, whose preferred method is sanitized destruction: murder at scale with unthinkable weaponry, murder of those who resist it, murder of what’s beloved and the innocent to prove that its power is limitless. It feels like prolonged dissociation, knowing what is taking place but existing at near-total remove to counter it, through the unmatched and absolute bravery of Palestinian journalists and those documenting both their terror, and their joy, on social media. I come to each written work in this latest issue of Annulet from yet another hour of our failure, and we each come to read and write, consider what is part of our experience, what is valuable to us—a book, an idea, a view into another’s thought or feeling, the language of its form—that we preserve from within these ongoing hours of failure. This is the unendurable place from which, especially if you are a citizen of the U.S., we must begin.

But from another view of this lenticular edge, in the moment after the moment in which genocide of the Palestinian people stops, the sweet fruit of existence might begin to resume proper, possible proportion—“a world joyfully reconstituted,” as Issam Zineh writes in his third contribution to Annulet—which is what each and every human being deserves. That is a view shaped by hope. Lately, these states of feeling—hope, joy, even peace—have become a strain to take at face value, especially for those whose relationship to these principles has been warped, whether rationally or irrationally, ethical action abstracted away from us, pain refracted back to us. Speaking for myself, I admit that I’d become uncertain of “joy,” more the frequent use of the word than feeling itself, as it’s so often pitched as the ideal interior state—to be compelled towards ecstatic reaction again and again in the frictionless realm of “positive vibes only.” But as Issam Zineh details, in his annulet on Ross Gay’s poem “Patience,” accessing and inhabiting patience or joy is inherently complex, can be reclaimed through poetry for the purpose of agency, of “redistribution of power” amidst the ruins.

It only makes sense, given these circumstances, that there’s a coincidence of work in Issue (8) that contends with the systems that shape contemporary life, from ecology to the highway system, from Cody-Rose Clevidence’s immediate, torrentially networked excerpt from their upcoming collection, This Household of Earthly Nature—a long sequence that reads like an interpellated, twenty-first century iteration of A.R. Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), listing, accounting, and holding what is true and dear in the endless proliferation of information, document and screen—to Knar Gavin’s lesson in twelve lines that begins:

The US highway system and its MFA programs
share nascency. Two fronts of an anti-red raid

exacted through parcel post…

Anna Lena Phillips Bell shows us how prosody acts as ecopoetic harm reduction by close reading “Anthropocene” by Lisa Williams—one positive variation of making more out of less in a radical retooling of what’s typically claimed by poetry traditionalists who fetishize austerity logic, even in their art. Bell, rightly reading Williams, turns this on its head. Maxwell Gontarek makes the case for a third-wave ecopoetics in a comparative essay that offers an amendment to Min Hyuong Song’s argument in Climate Lyricism, claiming instead that it’s in a strategic return to Romanticism that the rudiments for a refreshed ecopoetic perspective may be found. Nicole Arocho Hernández, in their review of mónica teresa ortiz’s Book of Provocations, observes that ortiz’s poetics—not just necropastoral, but laced with anarchism—“journey towards a collective creation of a post-empire future.” In his double review, Omid Bagherli adroitly contrasts Eunsong Kim’s exhaustive critique of Modernism’s predatory aesthetic and acquisition practices with the generative, alternative archive-building chronicled by Laura E. Helton in Scattered and Fugitive Things, a Black material history that thrived in its occlusion from the dominant channels of cultural value. Another version of hope appears, here, in what we don’t yet know about what alternatives are being cultivated, hidden or fugitive, for a time beyond this weighted present.

If the past’s literary forms teach us anything, it’s that there’s no single way to address inequity or moral failure, nor that there’s one single method for living through it. Whether it’s through immersion into the landscape as a hermeneutic means of perspectival recalibration, like in Oscar Oswald’s two peripatetic poems, or Marshall Woodward’s oblique, spiny exclamations, or in the anhedonic retreat lived out by Brianna Di Monda’s protagonist in her short story, “Home-Cosmography,” sometimes an indirect approach is the only manageable route. Poupeh Missaghi’s excerpt from her novella, Sound Museum, reminiscent of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon meets today’s Bernhardian fictive vein, critically dramatizes the hallucinatory imbrications of liberalism and curation while living under a regime (with thanks to Coffee House Press as we worked to find the right excerpt). Aditi Machado’s second of two poems included in this issue, “Bent Record,” ironizes indirection such that the claim of complicity is bent back towards an even darker realism, riding the tonal and moral edge of the inescapable truth of our daily damage contra the impossible demand that we redress it—

And I knew just enough

to be toxic to the earth. In the raw bar of moonlight

I projected my one feeling which littered the street and mobilized

dawn and the sun came down its high metaphor and distended

the body's odor and it was I who said something is rotten

in the state ... for in such palaces as these one is armed with barbs

to the teeth ... And yes,

I darkened the web and I defrauded the

publican and on stormy nights I withheld from classification

those very secrets which pierce the hearts of young historians.

That tone is echoed in a recent translation, by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodward, of the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli, the daughter of antifascist activists, who wrote this poem in 1976 that’s only just now been translated:

Nobody
admitted having been betrayed
I pretended to be calm stopped crying
then reported the data in
the news.

Digging out magazines from their
handy drawer,
the flooring forced to
level itself.

Diminished empire,
he wasn’t sure he could attempt the jaunt
past the time in which you contentedly
looked in your panties, contented
with whatever mood

follies-bergères behind each
piece of furniture, permanently
moveable each morning…

You’ll have to seek the poem’s ending and read the other four translations included in Issue (8), along with translations of Galician poet Oriana Méndez by Jacob Rogers, and new work from Eva Kristina Olsson, translated by Johannes Göransson, for recourse to their respective spectral pools of language, planes of vision. Relatedly, I’ve decided to include a reprint of a mimeograph of a long, trance-like poem by the Language-adjacent poet Mary Lane called “Electricity.” Lane’s enunciations are similar to Hannah Wiener, but the supernatural’s fluctuations are charted in streamlined duration, repetition. My inquiry into her work and life beyond finding this poem by chance was unsuccessful—so if you happen to have any further information about her whereabouts or writing career, I would be incredibly glad to receive it.

This past summer, I wrote and gave a lecture called “The Making of a Literary Magazine” in which I attempted to give the complete context for Annulet in forty-five minutes. While I managed to begin defining some of my objectives and approach, among the many things I realized as I attempted to compress at high clip the history of the literary periodical, is that it’s never a clement time to start a journal, nor is it, by extension, a clement time for any literary activity. Don’t let any depressive or cynical nostrum discourage you from it. Despite precarity, despite ephemerality, we keep so much alive in writing, making, and reading, I mean, of one another’s experience amidst others—not least our souls—in the effort to make meaning out of whatever our experience of calamity or calm might be.

I want to thank the three sections, secret to each other until now, of this summer’s Critical Circle for each group’s gorgeously, distinctively rigorous commitment to reading one another in depth. Their care for the work of literary criticism demonstrated afresh to me one of Annulet’s core principles—that attention itself is a meaningful and radical act, as is taking all the time that’s needed to truly understand what someone has written and the research context for it. This summer’s participants included e.jin, Alex Tan, Meredith Macleod Davidson, Asa Drake, Annie Zidek, Darcie Dennigan, Megan McKenzie, Cecily Chen, Jamie Groetsema, Caitlyn Klum, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, and C.T. Salazar—who also just joined our masthead as a Contributing Editor. Along with Megan and Anna Lena, you might see more of these names appear again either in this or future issues of Annulet. I also want to highlight this year’s Linkages Lecturer, Zach Savich, whose two lectures were chosen from a brilliant array of recommendations and applicants—some of whom are working on reconfiguring their lectures into essay form for our next issue. Please join us on December 7th and December 15th for his delivery of  “The Roethke Premise: Two Lectures from a Field of Telephones.” Hijinks may ensue.

Whatever may come between now and the next issue, let us hope that succor reaches those who need it most. May there be all-encompassing mercy—the genocide must end—and may we see mercy’s light break into our shared world as we write toward the better future, because we must.


In the hour,

Alicia Wright
Editor, Annulet