There was another time and another place, and from that place, Jana’s mother pulls forth stories of swamps and leeches, broken bones, neighborhood dogs turned rabid, cars without air conditioning, snakes in yards. Her mother calls this place Childhood.

In Kimmery Martin’s second novel, one character tells another, “Sometimes there’s no antidote for what’s wrong,” to which they receive the response, “There’s an antidote for everything…sometimes you just have to figure out what it is…sometimes the cure is worse than the poison.” This sort of pragmatist logic and quasi-medical jargon pack the pages of the author’s sophomore effort. Throughout her latest novel, the doctor-turned-writer builds on the skills developed in 2018’s The Queen of Hearts and works to use the platform of fiction to draw readers into soapy drama structures while pointing to a more serious reality: discrimination in medicine.

“The Korean word jeong is untranslatable but the closest definition is ‘an instantaneous deep connection,’ often between Koreans,” Cathy Park Hong writes in her new essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Perhaps this is one of the things the book accomplishes: building a deep and immediate sense of connection, intimacy and awareness. Minor Feelings moves between cultural criticism, memoir, history, and research, asking questions about Asian American identity, both collective and individual. The essays are provocative, as they are vulnerable and tender. Hong draws on her experiences of being raised in Koreatown, Los Angeles, fraught family dynamics, friendship and art, in order to understand the Asian American psyche. In this quest, she urges her readers to consider how we imbue people with preconceived stereotypes and expectations related to race.

“Me finding a new love interest had always been like a greedy child opening a toy on Christmas Day. I ripped the packaging open, got frustrated trying to make it work, played with it obsessively until it broke, then chucked the broken pieces of plastic in the back of a cupboard on Boxing Day.”

The accomplishment of No Roses from My Mouth by renowned Ugandan feminist and queer rights advocate Stella Nyanzi, it not so much that the poetry collection was written in jail, but because it’s as thorny as the writing that got her imprisoned.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural Black History Month Special Issue, in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. We want to thank everyone who submitted for creating art and sharing their work with us, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. All winners and runner-ups will be published on Wednesday, February 19th, or shortly thereafter.

The vanishing trail led to a tangle of chicories —
to the scythes still swinging over the bloodied
beer cans, whiskey bottles, oak tree stump

I woke today with the same attitude I always have
one fist cured and another open.
I call this the Black girl stance.

For an afternoon, Georgie offered me friendship and $50 dollars’ worth of Kanekalon jumbo, included in the box style. Braiding hair, silk-soft and crimped, blackest at the tips. I took her offers, because I wanted a friend and saved enough money to buy a new version of myself that month.

The owner had been dead three weeks when the dog vanished.

Pay attention on the subway. Things can happen fast. Trains derail. Maybe the conductor will announce that your train will skip all stops between 149th Street and Grand Concourse and 42nd Street-Times Square because of track work. Don’t listen to music too loudly, so you can hear the announcement if the conductor decides to make it. You need to get from 149th street and 3rd avenue (in the Bronx) to 125th street (in Harlem) to pick up a pint of gin from the liquor store before you go to a new club in Bushwick. You don’t want to buy drinks inside the venue—who wants to pay $13 for an eight-ounce drink when you could just pay $7 for a whole pint? Sneak it in. You need to get the alcohol in Harlem because it’s cheaper, and your friend Isabella asked you to get it from this store, because the prices “are basically wholesale,” and you always take Isabella’s advice. Isabella. You always go out of your way for her.

Again we’re talking of “conservation” and “efforts”
not of, say, a rainforest, but of landscapes
in oils or acrylics, and I was never an art student

It’s early evening on a weeknight when I turn on the local news. A high speed police chase is in progress. A suspect is fleeing from the cops, weaving his way through the San Fernando Valley streets with no obvious destination. The man’s arm is outside the window, hand open as if he’s grabbing the wind. I’m not surprised he’s black since most police chases in Los Angeles involve black and brown-skinned men. As the black mother of a teenage boy, I feel panicked thinking about the potential for police violence in this situation. Will they shoot first, then ask questions later? The suspect dictates the pace and rhythm of this rollicking cat and mouse game. If he speeds up, so do the police. When he slows down, the police will too. At some point, the power balance could shift. A wrong move by the suspect or an aggressive law enforcement attempt to end the chase with a spike strip or a pit maneuver could cause the driver to turn sideways, lose control and come to a stop. I am irresistibly drawn to this frightening scene

Danez Smith’s newest collection, Homie, takes their readers on a dazzlingly divine, chaotic, radically loving, and politically astute hang-out. Smith is a black and queer poet-performer who also wrote the acclaimed collection, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017). They craft their follow-up book to come out swinging as a commemoration of friends, the black community, and the queer self. Smith observes the world around them with a sense of beautiful kindness.

“We’re not sure why the pond turns pink; I mean, there are theories,” Zed said, right hand forcefully punctuating his words, left hand on the wheel.

Today, Valentine’s Day, we wanted to take a moment to offer our affections to the art of translation. Online Translation Editor Stephanie Philp asked translators two questions about the sometimes grueling, always complicated, forever alive practice. We wanted to know: what do they love about translation?

Conversational Spanish
pay gar(d) la go-rrah: we are broke and we love Jesus, the way only broke people can.
oh-(h)allah, cay? you eva cafe en el camp-o: Lets drink wine, a lot of wine. Miracles of wine.
And when the water comes, or the fires burn, pray like only the washed away can pray.

“It’s been twelve years of love and quiet work to get it here,” Douglas Stuart recently said on Instagram of his debut novel. “The first draft was 900 pages long and needed to be housed in two ring binders. There has been 13 drafts since, and lots of self doubt, laughter, and distractions along the way.” A similar range of emotions can be experienced when reading Shuggie Bain, a heart-wrenching tale that unfolds and unravels across 400 pages and more than a decade of love, loss, and pride.

I can’t find them in abandoned pit mines scattered lakes of
limestone & water łužiska jĕzorina villages on the land
seized treasure your voices of coal and rock crushed

Now 84, Vivian Gornick has written an essay collection she could not have completed when she was younger. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, recently published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, is the product of a perspective that comes only with time. In this book, she describes her lifelong habit of reading and re-reading books. She notes the ways both the impact of those books and her interpretations of them have evolved as she has aged.