Issue 20.2, Fall 2024
Get all broadsides in one PDF to print and enjoy.
Editors’ Note
Since 2012, Broadsided has focused on poems in translation in the fall and, from the start, we’ve centered translations of writers working in languages Indigenous to the Americas. This year, our new Translations editor, Ines Hernandez-Avila, selected work by two Maya Tsotsil poets in Chiapas, Mexico:
In both poems, the poets affirm their kinship with their worlds and reveal a heightened consciousness of what Manuel Bolom Pale, another distinguished Maya Tsotsil poet, would call cosmoconocimientos / knowledges of the cosmos. “Sjob” speaks to a return to self in the circle of the temascal, “Tj Jk’ope” to the awakened word, born from struggle compelling the tongue to scream so that the earth hears / feels the mutually urgent embrace. “Sjob” is also about the earth’s embrace. Their wor(l)ds compel me deeply.
–Ines Hernandez-Avila
The other broadsides in this folio focus on travel–whether it’s to the moon, to/from family, or in migration. We invite you to consider how Kevin Morrow’s delicately balanced sculpture speaks to Helen Beckman Kaplan’s frenzy of lines, how the snaking forms in Amy Meissner’s sculpture, Cheryl Gross’s drawing, and Rosalba Breazeale’s chemilumen print echo one another. This link gives you all broadsides in one PDF to print and enjoy.
Each collaboration is published alongside a smart, engaging conversation between artist and writer about the origins of their art, creative prompts, books and art that have recently inspired them, insights about the folio as a whole, and more. Here are a few examples:
Artist Rosalba Breazeale (“Mi Palabra / Ti Jk’ope / My Word”): The poem elicits a sense of resilience and strength which, for me, is derived from Pacha (the Quechua word for the earth). 500 years after the beginning of European colonization of Abya Yala (the so-called Americas), there is still so much work and healing to be done. Being with the land gives me the ability to heal from past and present traumas. This photographic print is a direct recording of plant relatives, light, and air during my residency at Hewnoaks, which is located on the traditional territory of the Wabanaki (Lovell, Maine).
Artist Amy Meissner (“Poem About Vape”): I’m initially drawn to work that acknowledges the hand, whether through mark making or manipulation of materials that require technical skills to form and shape. This folio collection is visually pleasing to me in this way.
Poeta María Concepción Bautista Vázquez (“Vapor / Sjob / Steam”): La imagen estética de los tres idiomas, hacen de una composición visual dinámica y equilibrada, con un aroma naturalista.
Artist Cheryl Gross (“Vapor / Sjob / Steam”): I found the poem perfectly described my visual image. Like I said, purely an accident, or not an accident at all.
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño (“Leaving”): I grew up in Colombia and came to the United States at age eighteen, not realizing I would be leaving my country for good. More than twenty years later, I heard someone from Tacoma Community House talk about services they offer, including supporting immigrants as they mourn the country they have left behind. It stopped me in my tracks. I realized that I had never mourned my leaving, hadn’t allowed myself to be in the place I was.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan (“Leaving”): “I’ve been studying, these days, how things end” offered such an engaging promise. I loved the pace and transitions that followed. I loved the poem’s specific images. The last lines of the poem described a relief and permission that I’m often seeking both inside and outside the studio.
Poet xochi quetzali cartland (Lunar Landing (1975)”): This poem was really inspired by the movie A Million Miles Away, which is about the life of José M. Hernández, the first Mexican-American astronaut. I was watching the movie with my mom, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico. It filled me with both a deep joy and a deep sadness to see how we each engaged with the movie.
Artist Kevin Morrow (Lunar Landing (1975)”): I began the work entirely as a work of stone. Her mentions of stone in the poem made me jump right to that, but it became evident to me that that was too much the obvious answer—and for whatever reason as I progressed through the stone(s) it just wasn’t clicking, so I transitioned to using mostly wood, though retaining a small bit of stone (alabaster) in the work.
Broadsides to Books: The Language of Empire
Jennifer Perrine’s harrowing fourth book, Again, explores how a president’s language can create a nation mobilized in opposition to a feared other. The poems here range widely in tone: at times the voice speaks from the midst of horrific violence, while at others, hilarity and grief mingle together. The images are crystalline, disturbing, and precise as they create a world of apocalyptic dread: “…we keep watch / on the supplies, each other, / the guns,” they say in “Disaster,” “We sip shallow breaths. / We remain buried, alive.” Read the full review.
Submissions Open!
We’ll have our fall editorial meeting the first week of December. If you’d like your work to be considered for our spring folio, send it to us! Please keep in mind the nature of our publication when you choose work to send to us: we seek shorter work with a strong visual spark and are equally thrilled to published emerging and established writers. Our submissions are open.
With joy,
The Broadsided team–
Elizabeth Bradfield, Michelle Moncayo, Rajiv Mohabir, Miller Oberman, Alexandra Teague (editorial)
Millian Pham Lien Giang (art)
Ines Hernandez-Avila (translations)
Andrew Gottleib, Nayoung Kim (reviews)
John Nieves (teaching)
Autumn Bellan (outreach/communications)
Megan Tan (design)