Recently, one morning at the crack of dawn, I was awoken by what sounded like a wrecking ball coming through my bedroom wall. It was, in fact, not coming through my bedroom wall, but rather the wall of the building next to me—a complete teardown. Apparently it takes more than one collision to destroy a structure of this size, because the sound carried on for hours, and then days, before transforming into other sounds—bulldozers moving brick, jackhammers splitting pavement, drills puncturing pipes—always rising with the sun. It’s a terrible way to start the day, particularly for a person who finds himself in a bad mood even at the best of times.

I came to poetry by way of Pablo Neruda, seeking the poets of my continent for guidance when the Europeans and Americans—the Plaths and Rimbauds and Dantes of the world—encouraged dark thoughts in me. Across the cordillera, off the southernmost tip of America, Neruda’s countryman had been going blind and making waves of his own, away from the odes to the body and the waves that drew me in.

This is how it happened.
You or I got off the bus and met on the street. We held hands until I let yours drop because the sidewalks were crowded or my palm was sweaty or I wanted to hurt you. You tried to take it back, but I adjusted the strap of my bag or combed a loose piece of hair or dug in a pocket.

We make our way through the corners of the grand old building that houses the Buenos Aires Jewish Museum, following the guide—an elegant woman with a friendly smile—and looking at passing displays with old prayer books decorated in mother-of-pearl and gold leaf, a letter from Albert Einstein to the Argentine Jewish community, and even a table set with plastic food and electric candles in imitation of the Shabbat ceremony.

Gertrude Stein said that, “One of the things that is a very interesting thing to know is how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.” Poet Donald Revell captures that very feeling—a feeling which became a catalyst for the blazing onset of French Modernism—in his translation of surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Le brasier” in Columbia Journal’s twenty-second issue, from the winter of 1994. I thoroughly enjoy the first two lines of the translation, which Revell ingeniously flipped. “What I adore and transport/ I’ve thrown into the fire” (1-2). Revell makes it more palatable for an English-speaking reader without losing its flair. He does an outstanding job capturing the slant rhymes Apollinaire uses, such as with the rhyme of “testicles” and “vegetables.” At times he gets creative and writes a rhyme where one didn’t exist in the original.

it’s true when I tell you
I don’t know what’s good for my health
like wiping my powdered fingers

Macbeth, to my mind, is a play that shouldn’t work but does. It’s quite clear that, politically, it served to flatter James I’s ego in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. So, we would expect it to be propaganda and nothing more. Yet what we get is an unforgettable work of art, alarming in its intensity; Duncan may rest in peace, but the dagger is still in us when we’ve left the theatre.

Garielle Lutz once called the sentence a lonely place. For Lutz, that lonely sentence is a site of beauty and complexity. She writes conventional stories with musical sentences.

Published only five years ago in 2017 in the Columbia Journal, “Three Incidents of Rain” follows a girl, then a woman, in her journey to comprehend tragedy and love, and the intersection of feeling at both extremes. Told from the ages of eight, thirteen, and twenty-five, the unnamed narrator recollects an early encounter with the morbid curiosity of humanity, revels in the first moments of queer love with a girl who thinks she can fly, and grapples with the sudden loss of her father in an accident. T Kira Madden’s sparse and evocative prose punches holes in itself, through which the reader can peek to intuit the various emotional registers on which each sentence operates. For example, Madden captures the disembodiment of grief as the narrator describes herself speaking to a coworker: “These are the things my mouth is saying.”

In his 2015 review published in The Atlantic, Garth Greenwell heralded Hanya Yanagihara’s previous novel, A Little Life, as potentially “the great gay novel,” praising its perceptiveness in depicting the gay male experience in America and positing that the book was “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.” To some extent, Yanagihara’s latest novel, To Paradise, might be considered an even greater gay novel. Not only is it queer in its foregrounding of gay protagonists and socio-political themes of discrimination, non-traditional relationships, the AIDS epidemic, and racial and class-conscious intersectionality, but also in its upending of literary forms and transgressive world-building. Yanagihara excels at blending the recognizable with the inventive and also at times the absurd to tell tales of unconventional love, desire, and longing. Like its predecessor, To Paradise deserves a place on the mantel of esteemed genre-bending queer fiction, alongside Renee Gladman’s The Event Factory, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, and other novels engaged in radical world-building.

Democracy is difficult to think about, difficult to write about, and difficult to live. At least, in 2022, a lot of people seem to believe so. Forty years ago, Jorge Luis Borges (writer of poems, essays, and “fictions”) spoke to an assembly of Columbia Writing students and made a beautiful claim: that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is the most daring and the most successful of all literary experiments, because it is an epic poem of democracy. Such a poem had never been attempted before and has not been attempted since. (The picture above was taken by yours truly from a balcony of the Palacio Barolo, a Dante-themed building in Buenos Aires. The Argentina of Borges was and is no stranger to the fraught nature of democracy in a world ideologized in favor of hierarchy: so the juxtaposition of Dante and Whitman is very neat.) In the face of such a difficulty, many fall silent; not Whitman.

January can be a rather miserable month: after the excitement of the new year, one is left with the same old grayness. But a poet finds potential newness in every moment; and I find that, speaking of winter, snow can be an excellent excuse for a poem. Consider Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man“: one doesn’t forget a thing like that.

The fifty-ninth issue of Columbia Journal featured a poem by English poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and, as it so happens, I was given a copy of Rivas’s book Terror as a present at Christmas. In the interest of superstition, I felt I couldn’t not feature his poem; and, jokes aside, I like “The Floodmeadow.”

During the spring/summer of 1983, Columbia Journal published Linda Gregg’s poem “At the Gate in the Middle of My Life” in its eighth issue. An award-winning American poet, Gregg often explored loss, struggle, and nature in her writing. In this poem from our archive, she demonstrates her close inspection of what it means to be at the entrance of one’s midlife or the central period of one’s years.

knows what it’s like to hold & not
be held mama nancy, who is not my
mama, but is the oldest mama I have

I will, no doubt, tell your story one day:
After all, it is always with us.
A, black, shadows

Almost immediately, Emma noticed the girl in the transparent pink dress standing next to the champagne tower, her red bra completely visible underneath frothy frills and folds. Emma snuck one glance as her boyfriend, Leonard, helped her out of her coat, then another as they hugged their hosts, Shelly and Adrienne. The e-vites had required cocktail attire, and glancing around the apartment, everyone else had taken this to mean black. With her copper-red curls piled high on her head, the girl by the tower looked like the Strawberry Shortcake dolls Emma played with as a child, utterly out of place.

I recently got around to re-reading Robin Coste Lewis’s genius “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” As a poet interested in erasures and cut-ups, and as a queer Venezuelan immigrant deeply concerned with and invested in the liberation of every marginalized community, I was deeply moved by her project. To use the very language of oppressive art institutions, pamphlets, and works to weave the narrative of Black liberation and conceive of a future for the Black community that was forcibly taken to this country is something I held onto as I looked through Columbia Journal‘s archives, another institution that has regrettably done little in the way of publishing Black voices. I’m honored to work here at a pivotal moment, when the largest strike in the country is taking place on my campus and when the current editorial team at the Journal is making a conscious effort to elevate Black voices.

I cut onions and squeeze lemons: I behold the spectacle of the world.“A Poetic State” by Czesław Miłosz, translated from Polish to English by the author and Robert Hass, is a wonder to behold. It was published in the eighth issue of Columbia Journal in 1983.

Irish poet Eavan Boland passed away on April 27, 2020. She will be remembered for her finely wrought lyric meditations on womanhood, domesticity, and Ireland’s colonial history.