By Alex Wexelman

The first piece in the debut issue of Columbia Journal features three female poets quizzing the recently retired United States Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz, who lived to be 100, was a teacher, a poet, and a gardener of great repute.

By Noah Grey Rosenzweig

My boyfriend gets out of the back seat, pulling his phone out of his back pocket as he straightens up, tapping “record” with a slim finger. His voice is steady when he asks me, the phone held between us, “What are we doing today?” I look up at the camera and tilt my head, squinting against the sun and the fear.

“Getting top surgery,” I say.

By Carlie Hoffman

It was October. An unseasonably warm day. I know because I was wearing shoes without socks. Near the campus of John F. Kennedy High School, the stray geese crowded on the brown grass by the traffic circle, like groupies as if the honking horns of the cars were a rock band.

Besides the fact that I happened to be living in one of them, all the houses looked exactly the same: blue clapboard and white vinyl trim stippled to look like real wood. Houses with landlines and hot tub hookups and no hot tubs attached. Horseshoe-shaped driveways, single acre lots. Idyllic little prefab Kennedy compounds. Pretty much the entire development had been deserted since Labor Day, which was when I’d arrived on the scene, still tan from the final summer of what I’d already begun to think of as my Old Life.

“Talk the fire out” is what they called it. In that small place of green crops and clapboard churches, it was a power kept among washed-in-The-Blood types. A kind of faith-healing passed down from one family member to another. I heard tell of a man who melted his hand with fireworks; it healed in a few days with no scar. A woman who spilled hot grease on her leg but the blisters faded without a lick of pain. I’d never seen it done, but we all knew about this power.

A still life of a glass a lemon-squeezer half / a lemon and a little pot with drinking straws / and the light, so Picasso described one / of his paintings in a letter.

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2023 Online Contest, which was judged by Jackie Ess, Haley Mlotek, and Natalie Shapero. 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.

As one of the early Russian Symbolists of the late nineteenth century Sologub—like his artist in “The Lady in Shackles,” another story in the collection—is of paltry fame but important talent. Better known for his poetry and novels, he’s credited for bringing the cynical and macabre motifs of Western Europe’s fin de siècle to Russian literature.

Poetry and terror are so interwoven, it is impossible to extricate one without disturbing the other. They run into each other, borderless and pervasive, like music, or scent.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs actualizes how marine mammals survive and how they die in a capitalistic society as one in the same with Black survival and death. This might sound conspiratorial—because it is. Yet this book truly is a scientific guide on marine mammals.

Marisa (Mac) Crane is the author of the debut novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, in which a queer, first-time parent must navigate child-rearing while grieving the loss of her partner to childbirth.

Kristopher Jansma’s work isn’t just about the lives of writers; we all tell stories, published or unpublished. We don’t all have to be idealists, but we can all have ideals.

Have you ever watched someone eat an orange and not had the urge to ask, Could I have a piece, please? If you have, then I’m afraid you might be stronger than most / The orange is dined on delicately / She requires care, from start to finish / Even the tearing of her sheath must be done with care or else you sacrifice parts of her fleshy sweetness—first to the rind, then to the compost […]

Jess Richards’ memoir Birds and Ghosts is peppered with pencil sketches of birds—peppered because the specks of bird appear like grains of pepper, coalescing into network structures. Poetry, lyric essay, memoir, prose poetry, occult reflections, and sketches join to form a map, a network, shaped like a brain by connections and synaptic firings.

Superman has nothing on my older brother when he’s high on crack. Muscles tensed, jaw clenched, underwear drenched in piss, standing in the hallway of my mother’s walk-up, years before her death and still more before Tommy winds up beaten down in a half-way house for Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICA) patients […]

The Guest is all about nonattachment. It follows a twenty-two-year-old woman named Alex as she is expunged from the home of Simon, the wealthy older man she has been staying with for the summer. The narrative action clings, as though in real time, to the five days she is left to wander the “wilderness” of Long Island’s East End, until a party on Labour Day, when Alex hopes to re-attach herself to Simon, and the trappings of his rarefied life.

Austrian writer Monika Helfer’s 2020 novel Die Bagage—recently released in English under the title of Last House Before the Mountain (Bloomsbury, April 2023), and translated by Gillian Davidson—is a story of home and homeland, of belonging and alienation, of secrets that span generations.

Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough is Dina Nayeri’s second and latest nonfiction book, released in March. The book balances powerful case studies with the deeply personal as Nayeri analyzes why those who are most vulnerable are often dismissed and disbelieved. It’s a large topic, but she doesn’t stray away from complex ideas and questions such as truth and facts. Instead, she makes them digestible for the reader and expands our worldviews while folding us into that long, slow work of believing.

By Matthew Gonzalez

I was at a loss for words when I first read Gonzalo Rojas’s “Numen.” I couldn’t find any solid ground in the distance between the images he uses. After a dive into the body of Spanish-language criticism of Rojas, it’s my position that to evade meaning is the meaning of “Numen.”

The only son Garry wanted wasn’t even a blood son. A reject, a castoff. Thomas, this non-son, had a forehead scooped into a kind of slight horn. Pinched-out lips. Laugh like a throttled chicken. But Garry knew from his years training airborne cadets that without him, the boy’s life was a coin flip: Thomas, a fatherless fuck-up, or Thomas, a true leader of men.