Speak to lightning, a memento of my beloved

—plunging into still dark—

if he remembers how he thundered me:

I was laying on my couch, fishing pot stickers out of a Chinese to-go box, and watching a movie on my ex’s Disney+ account when my phone started chirping to life, and the record should note that I was done with the day.

The moment you hit send you know you’re fucked. Still, there’s a chance that if you move fast enough you can rip the cable from the back of your computer and prevent the email from blasting out to the group distribution list. Processing that thought takes less than one second and is accompanied by what feels like a full quart of adrenaline hitting your bloodstream with the force of a speedball. And so down you go, oblivious to the perilous state of your heart, which is already jackhammering an exit from your chest, into a briar patch of dust bunnies and dog-eared copies of The Economist and paper bag sarcophagi of rancid half-eaten lunches. Another second. You find the wire and yank so hard that your elbow smacks the underside of your desk and launches a Starbucks cup filled with two days of tobacco spit onto the carpet next to Alvarez’s foot. He recoils and fires off automatic rounds of trilled and profane vernacular but you barely hear it because you’re back on your feet in a modified three-point stance, your chair capsized next to you, your hand on the desk for support, your face six inches from the screen, searching for the parenthetical that will save your life: Outbox (1).

“Adversity,” by Neesa Ahmed, is a selection for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Uprising in the art category.

Shalvi J Shah, an MFA candidate in Fiction and Literary Translation and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, talks to author Jenny Bhatt about craft, cultural stereotypes, her debut short story collection Each of Us Killers, and how far artists go to create.

I mean, come on coach, you know what it’s like, when you’re on the ice and you’re all hopped up and ready to go. You used to play too. And my dad played football and hockey for a bit when he was growing up. You should hear some of the things they’d say to each other then. He’s told me. Like some messed up shit. Like when we drive home after games, he says things to me, too. About how I need to move my feet more and keep my head up, and about how you’ve gotta dominate the enemy. Fuck ‘em. Get in their heads, ya know? That’s just part of the game. Chirping. Talking. Blowing kisses. Like, I get it, I understand what was so bad. But, I mean, come on coach, I’m sure it’s not the first time he’s heard that word. We listen to rap in the locker room, don’t we?

Columbia Journal is excited to introduce our podcast with poet Joe Pan, publisher of Brooklyn Arts Press and the smallest press to ever win the National Book Awards. Hear the episode, which details a conversation between Columbia Journal’s Issue 58 editors Shalvi Shah and Emma Ginader. Find out what it means to be a good literary citizen, how longing and anguish can create space for civic or literary engagement, and the perils and joys of small press publishing in this riveting interview with one of the literary world’s visionaries.

To be butchered between the banks
of North & South Bend & Black Lives
Matter asked her to suspend

How do you heal from the pain of growing up? This question, refracted through a feminist lens, lies at the heart of Melissa Febos’s essay collection, Girlhood. With psychological clarity and emotional precision, Febos revisits the past to rewrite the future.

Abhigna Mooraka, Columns Editor for Columbia Journal Issue 59, spoke to author Avni Doshi about her Booker-shortlisted Burnt Sugar, her writing process, and her art history background among other things. Burnt Sugar releases in the United States in January 2021 through The Overlook Press.

On the first day of lockdown, I play a movie for the kids so I can move bedroom furniture: eight-drawer dresser, queen bed, desk, file cabinet, nightstand, lamps. My husband works upstairs, in the apartment of neighbors who have fled upstate.

I am a part
of whatever I create,
my contradictions and my compunctions

As we face this fateful day, we are reminded of this poignant article from around this time four years ago. The U.S. elections can be time markers, moments for hope, failures in democracy, and to many around the world, a strange, emotional show. Whatever the outcome, stay safe and keep reading.

The other day, I texted my stepbrother for the first time in months—our relationship was one of the many that has been irreparably altered by the current political climate.

On October 17, 2020, Globus Books, an indie store that specializes in bringing Russian literature to the Bay Area and the wider country, hosted a live event to present Galina Ryumbu’s new book of poetry, Life in Space in English translation, translated by Joan Brooks and others, and forwarded by Eugene Ostashevsky, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in November 2020. It is Rymbu’s first full-length poetry collection to be translated into English and includes poems from her three previous collections as well as new work. The book includes additional material translated by Helena Kernan, Charles Bernstein, Kevin M.F. Platt, Anastasiya Osipova, and others.

I felt many things as I read The Lightness, which is probably why I’m typing out this review a mere six hours after putting down the book. Generally, I’d let a book marinate. I’d let my mind soak in the words, the narrative, and the pages. Normally, I’d emerge slowly from the world of fiction, reluctantly type out a review, and then return to a world that’s achingly real. But with this book, I have mixed feelings. Feelings that I may forget if I soak for too long. So I’m emerging from the pages and deep-diving into my brain here.

The following poems are taken from Abraham Sutzkever’s collection, Poems from My Diary. Like many of the poems in the Diary, the selected works concern nature, as well as friendship and neighborliness.

Aman is, by all medical and anecdotal accounts, dying. He is suffering primary, secondary, and quaternary injuries including, but not limited to, pulmonary barotrauma, mesenteric shearing, and penetrating ballistic gastrointestinal perforation, which is to say that blood is leaking, syrup-thick, from his abdomen, fully destroying his Cambridge University t-shirt and the waistband of his pajama pants. As a British Panavia Tornado warplane careens overhead, the irony of his extraordinarily British alma mater is not lost on him.

Jinwoo Chong, online editor at Columbia Journal, spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, The Refugees, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and The Memory of War, and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, and the fiction judge of the 2020 Columbia Journal Winter Contest.

An elaborate disappearing act, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic’s novel Life of the Party (Clash Books) plots a young woman’s debaucherous romp through Milan’s high society as she acclimates her existing problems to a new milieu saturated by the fashion world and its attendant vices.