What do fractals and poetry have in common? What can be gained by thinking about randomness as a universal force? Why does something happen, instead of nothing? The Condition of Secrecy by Inger Christensen offers a new vibrant spectrum of potential answers. Considered to be a master of the avant-garde in Denmark, this posthumous translation of a collection of essays allows readers to experience her work at its most constructionally simplified. The collection is a chorus of lyrical memoir and philosophical discourse about poetry making. The discourse is written in a way in which the reader is also positioned as a poet, often articulating ideas in relationship to the reader as a fellow excavator into the chasm. Christensen’s musings articulate her ars poetica contingent on the inseparability between varying discourses, —ranging from mathematical to metaphysical as she relates, “Poetry is just one of human beings’ many ways of recognizing things, and the same schism runs through each of the other ways, be it philosophy, mathematics, or the natural sciences.” This interplay between language as a part of nature is as a way of collapsing the taxonomy that places poetry as esoteric or high-culture. Rather, poetry exists within more reachable and perceivable elevations.

On Monday, October 22, I spoke with artists Katie Giritlian and Esteban Jefferson about their collaboration and here,. The work will be released as the second issue of prompt:, a new publication from Mira Dayal and Nicole Kaack that asks two artists who have never worked together to produce a publication presented as a draft for further research. and here, takes the form of an email thread between Giritlian and Jefferson dating from July 2 to August 23, 2018. It launches today, Friday, October 26, at the CUE Art Foundation in Manhattan.

Another Scratch into a Postmodern Rabbit Hole

One way to talk about Haruki Murakami’s eighteenth work of fiction, Killing Commendatore, is as a bingo square. Many of Murakami’s usual suspects, whimsical tropes, and narrative-style of blurring the fantastic with the mundane in his works are present. Murakami creates a space for a nameless, recently divorced man as a protagonist, a space for supernatural occurrences, another for vivid descriptions about domestic chores. He creates a center space for female characters who are complex, supernatural forces at best, and reduced to coy, sexual objects at worst. The dialogue often consists of repeating what the protagonist has said. Bingo! Murakami’s characters’ lives are often described through a litany of what and how they ate and how they slept. The precise articulation of the mundane makes his more fantastical elements even more complicated and gorgeously weird.

In an interview with MFA candidate Raffi Joe Wartanian, John McPhee reflects on the panic, procrastination, and prolific output behind his celebrated approach to nonfiction. McPhee’s 38th book The Patch is one of seven essay collections for the longtime Princeton University faculty member and alumnus who began writing for The New Yorker in 1963. A recipient of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, McPhee is regarded as one of the major figures in helping shape the form of creative nonfiction.

Before the beds went away
There were bedtimes

Two poems from emerging Mexican poets Isabel Zapata and Martha Mega, which have been translated from Spanish by Manzanares de la Rosa.

All Aboard

Pittsburgh is a blue city nestled in the red part of a purple state. A political bruise. Take, for example, the pizza place on Cypress Street with the sign high up on the side of it, a four-by-four poster that has a caricature of Hillary Clinton holding a megaphone and yelling all aboard the Trump train. A week after it was put up — by the landlord of the building? The owner of the restaurant? A pizza-maker? — someone had launched something wet and gray and slimy at it, the remnants now a dark smear across the train and Hillary and dribbling down the building. I can only guess as to the contents of the projectile. A leaky bag of garbage, maybe? A torn bag of fresh dog shit? It’s impossible to say. The place also sells halal burgers. It says so, proudly, in the window, though I can’t attest to quality of the pizza or the meat.

In Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah presents us with a dystopia that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem too removed from our reality (schools push drugs on children to make them happy, people go to amusement parks to enact shootings, a white man gets acquitted of murdering five African American children on the basis of self-defense). It’s more like this dysfunctional scenario is a couple of decades into the future. Yet the stories are charming and caustic, memorable because they are full of sharp characters who are aware that their world is upside down. In the presence of the absurd, they question themselves and come up with the answer, ‘It’s not me, it’s you.’

Addiction doesn’t disappear, it only changes forms. I was hooked on idleness, but now I’m hooked on work. I was hooked on weed, now I inject Ketamine. I was hooked on Azadeh, now I’m hooked on Jaleh. I was hooked on being free of family ties, but now I’m hooked on my father.

In this interview with emerging and award-winning poet and Columbia MFA alumna Susannah Nevison, Nevison talks about disability, mass incarceration, and her upcoming collection, Lethal Theater (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Nevison is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College.

A short story by classic Japanese mystery and horror writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from Japanese by Lin King.

Crime novels are often just entry points to examining culture and society. In a tense, concentrated form, mysteries give writers the perfect excuse to look beyond the illusions of an orderly reality and, by following a determined system, can gracefully and entertainingly peel back layers of deception to find real revelations about our lives and ourselves. Mystery novelist Tana French is no exception to this rule, but in The Witch Elm she has provided readers with something that feels quite new.

Friends and Strangers, Katherine Bradford’s current show at Canada, opens with a large yellow diptych depicting a group of six male-coded figures facing the viewer. The painting hangs alone in the gallery’s entryway and at first the standing men strike me as menacing — their postures signal an approach, as if they’re in formation — but the painting’s title, “Waiting Room,” suggests that these figures aren’t necessarily in league. Maybe, instead, they’re some of the “strangers” that the exhibition’s title refers to, aligned here in their shared non-task of waiting but otherwise standing as solitary subjects.

If good creative writing sparks the instinct to write, The Shell Game provides ample embers to inspire a wide range of writers. Edited by Kim Adrian with a foreword by Brenda Miller, this new anthology published by The University of Nebraska Press is devoted to a type of nonfiction called the hermit crab essay. The hermit crab essay is a work whose form embodies the content in bold, literal, and symbiotic ways. (Think: an essay on accomplishments organized as a resume, a meditation on the daily grind written as a to-do list, etc.) When pondering this particular approach, where a lyric essay “borrows” another form to tell its story, Adrian muses that a hermit crab essay’s formal, often bizarre looking exterior can allow it to “exert its full magic, tempting one’s inner aesthete with its very oddness, forcing upon its readers a private debate: Is this a thing of beauty? An ingenious expression of the human imagination? Or a cop out?”

The last bees form a cloud that fills
the sky. One dies and then
another, little motor of the brain

As I was reading ​Deviation​, Anne Milano Appel’s English translation of Luce D’Eramo’s 1979 novel, I found myself increasingly surprised at the relatively minor position to which Luce D’Eramo and her masterful book have been relegated in the Italian literary canon. The novel is, on the surface level, formally straightforward, consisting of four parts that are each clearly connected to D’Eramo’s biography: her life working in a labor camp as a fervently Fascist volunteer, a political reawakening that leads to her internment in a concentration camp, and ultimately the process of learning how to navigate postwar life in the wake of wartime injuries that left her paralyzed. D’Eramo weaves these episodes together with meditations on memory and self-perception in life-writing as she unpacks the shift from her original Fascist ideology, connected to her bourgeois origins, to the eye-opening experiences of life in the camps.

Kate Atkinson’s inspiration for her latest novel Transcription initially came from a document released by the National Archives detailing the work of a WW2 agent known as “Jack King.” “Jack” was Eric Roberts, an outwardly pedestrian bank clerk who, in secret, worked for MI5 to infiltrate Fascist circles. He had posed as a Gestapo agent during the war, renting an apartment where he would meet regularly with British Fascists and various sympathizers who confided in Roberts with nefarious plots and plans. These meetings were then transcribed into documents over a hundred pages for the records of British intelligence. The technology for recording was not as advanced as it is now; there were, one could imagine, many gaps in the conversation that needed to be filled in.

Barry Cohen is on the lam. Multi-billionaire hedge-fund capitalist, collector of expensive watches, and engineer of the intricate mechanisms that trap him in his tony, Manhattan penthouse life — Barry packs his favorite timepieces into a rollerboard and absconds in the middle of the night. Ditching his credit cards, his wallet, all that ties him to his tremendous wealth, he boards a Greyhound bus headed for a college ex-girlfriend in Richmond, Virginia. Wife Seema is in the rearview, along with their son, Shiva, struggling with seemingly low-functioning autism in a world that barely forgives imperfections. A grain of sand in the clockwork of 1-percenter privilege.

My kneecap is a magnet for mosquitos.
They assemble under the picnic pavilion
And form a small cloud, the shape of a Pierre’s

Join us for an Evening with Columbia Journal at KGB Bar in New York City on October 30, 2018, starting at 7 pm! The reading will feature work from writers who help create the Journal and those who help to guide it, including: