These poems first appeared in Anna Glazova’s collection For the Shrew, which won the oldest independent literature award in Russia, the Andrey Bely Prize, in 2013. They have been translated from Russian by Alex Niemi.

When I arrived at Mr. John Gruen’s the following day he was not standing at the top of the stairs as I thought he might be. Instead, when I turned the corner, he was in the entranceway to their apartment. His hand was raised well above his head, his extended fingers paralleling the climb of the doorframe, and from his wrist to his crisscrossing feet his torso and bending legs nearly formed a parabola that defied some sort of mathematical logic. As I moved towards him his head bent in the opposite direction.

On a Wednesday afternoon in January, my phone lit up with a text message from Wes. I hadn’t heard from him in two days, and my creeping suspicions that he had forgotten about me, that I meant nothing to him, were relieved for the moment.

To my younger self, how wrong you were then
to mistake your hours for waiting,
suspicious the days were only hand motions, shopping bags,

A lot has changed for Louis Fratino in the past year, and his autobiographical paintings are a case in point. In Come Softly to Me, the twenty-five-year-old artist’s second solo show in New York and first at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Fratino’s work has absorbed the City, where he settled after a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Berlin. In “Me,” we see the Chrysler building reflected in his pupils; in “The Williamsburg Bridge,” we see him walking alone along the waterfront, the horizon on fire. Cocteau- and Matisse-inspired male odalisques lounge nude beside open windows, and same-sex couples embrace on dance floors, club-lit as if inside an ultramarine and cadmium-red kaleidoscope.

In summer, everyone is a body of water. This makes sense only if you believe in a general equilibrium of all things. The land dries like a parched white tongue and yet there is leaking everywhere. The sky breaks open, fault lines rupture, secretions bead on burnt skin. There is lethargy and a constant drowsiness from the heat. There is no escape from the light. Even nightfall pulls water from your body, the ground settling, cooling before it fires again with the sunrise. In summer, everyone is a body of water simmering in the center of an oven.

“It’s better for a star to never be around,” says Rikio Mizuno, the narrator of Yukio Mishima’s 1961 short novel Star (recently translated by Sam Bett for New Directions Press). “Absence is his forte,” he concludes. At twenty-four years old, Rikio has reached the height of his movie acting career. Young fans surround him on set. They idolize him, dress like him, mirror him. He finds them all disgusting, though he cannot find himself, despite appearing everywhere from press releases to the life-sized posters he plasters to the outside of his bedroom door. Celebrity has taken over his life. The entertainment bosses who hire and direct him have, in collaboration with the endless fans, agreed on who and what is: a bad-boy yakuza on screen, who in reality is an innocent heartthrob. His public life is controlled by this latter narrative, such that even when musing out loud about suicide, his assistant instructs him to make sure it looks like an accident if ever he decides to go through with it. An innocent heartthrob, after all, loves life, and never thinks of leaving this world.

In this interview, Columbia MFA graduate Caroline Bodian talks with Abbigail N. Rosewood about her debut, If I Had Two Lives. The novel is grounded in certain realities, realities of immigration and complex, yet enduring, female friendships, of loss and motherhood. Take a closer look and you’ll find a funhouse of mirrors, intense echoes, shifting parts, and blurred boundaries.

The pastor spoke of a savior, sins, end of times as they raised their open hands towards the sky with their eyes closed, towards a heaven of clouds and oxygen. I accepted Maeve’s invitation to the Evangelical service that took place every Saturday night in her neighborhood. We both walked from her house to her church while the grasshoppers called a looming night. The church was more the veranda of a small-cemented house with ceramic floors coated by a thin veil of dust. The windows creaked and spilled rust all around us when the pastor closed them. Plastic white chairs filled the room—those very same Dominican men sat on to play dominos inside sweaty colmados. An ailing man knelt at the center wearing a faded blue shirt with holes while the pastor held the crown of his head and cast out his risk of heart attack. The man looked up towards the sky until his eyes became two white stones and his body trembled as if struck by lightning.

The fingers fit perfectly, as did the wrists and hands. Not because his hands were delicate or small, but because hers were thick and work worn and because she kept her own skin on when she slipped into his. The arms she had to pin and tuck under the pits. The torso she let out here and there, pulling and replacing stitches to accommodate her soft middle, her moderate breasts. She was careful not to leave marks or add new holes or show her work, lest he find out. But she was an expert seamstress. That’s why he’d married her. There were other things between them, but those skills were her greatest asset—the one most relevant to a man who wore his skin as a suit during the day and shed it each night.

Suppose I start a cult. Suppose I bet a son.
Suppose where the world ends my body begins,
Wombed away, waiting while Mother witches drug runs,

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural 2019 Spring Contest, which was judged by Alexandra Kleeman, Tommy Pico, and Kiese Laymon. We want to thank everyone who entered the Contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full.

“Is it normal to be ashamed of loving?” asks Édouard Louis in his third intensely autobiographical novel, Who Killed My Father. This searing short work, with its conspicuously declarative title, turns around questions that aren’t quite questions, and answers that are bold politically driven accusations. It opens with the speaker—who, as we know from interviews, is Louis himself—paying a visit to his father in the northern French village of his childhood after several years of separation. Yes, his father is still alive, but Louis argues that a lifetime of poverty, manual labor, malnourishment, and lack of education condemned him to an early death at barely 50 years old. Using fragments and scenes, Louis sketches an urgent, yet intimate, portrait of his father, who we learn is the “you” throughout the book. The detail is excruciating: His belly has been “torn apart by its own weight” and his heart “can’t beat without assistance, without the help of a machine. It doesn’t want to.”

In Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, out now from Copper Canyon Press, poetry—like a virus—becomes a form of knowledge susceptible to transmission. Brown researches the act of communicability, as a pathologist might, to uncover in his poems how culture self-replicates within the cells of our bodies but requires intimate contact with an external body to proliferate.

Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing is an ear-opener. Based on the podcast of the same name from Radiotopia, the book is a multimodal experience, one that opens the ears through the eyes.

I moved from Buffalo, New York all the way down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi right when I got out of college. Grad school brought me there, as well as the inclination to follow the footsteps of Faulkner and John Shooter. Oh, and of course the weather.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, Mira T. Lee, whose gorgeous debut, Everything Here Is Beautiful, came out in paperback earlier this year, talks about the inspiration for her book, the process of writing her very first novel, and when she decided writing should be her career and not just her side-hustle.

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Vera Carothers spoke to translator Emma Ramadan about her career path and about translating Delphine Minoui’s newly released memoir, I’m Writing You From Tehran, a story about Iran’s complex history of political unrest and one journalist’s search to be closer to her paternal grandfather.

Accompanied by hope, escorted by desire, Kroll drove five hundred miles north to a dock where the road ended, and the sea began. There, still at the wheel of his leased silver Infiniti, Kroll entered the belly of a great ferry and was transported through mist to an island where he couldn’t find a place to have breakfast.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2018 Winter Contest, which was judged by Jericho Brown, Lauren Wilkinson, and Alexander Chee. We want to thank everyone who entered the Contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.