LINES OF SIGHT, AND BEYOND: A LECTURE AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Arthur Sze
ON THE CONSTRAINTS OF FICTION
Debbie Urbanski
The Birds as Decoding Society
Nathaniel Mackey
An Accordance
Alyssa Pelish
Americana Triptych
Kim Chinquee
Sleep Gate
Sylvia Legris
A Port to Speak Of
Laura Kolbe
Six Pantoums
John Yau
Nights With Art Bell
Aimee Bender
Just Up the Block
Rick Moody
How Does a Dead Woman Yell?
Katherine Cart
Baroque Prose
William H. Gass
Caden and Jayden
Marlon James
Sistren Sound System [2 tracks]
Marcia Douglas
An Adaptation of Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto 1
Lorna Goodison
The Logic of the Jab
Kei Miller
Looking House
Tiphanie Yanique
The Anababis of Godspeed
Ishion Hutchinson
Thelma’s Precious Cargo
Kwame Dawes
Thirty-Six-Thousand-Nought-Hundreds-and-Thirty-Six
Robert Antoni
My Soul Frets in the Shadow of His Language
Benjamin Hale
No Time Present
Kate Colby
Three Poems
Bin Ramke
Today for This
E. Y. Zhao
The Fifth Mother
Alison Braid-Fernandez
Mostly, she is trying to learn Italian
Barbara Tomash
Eight Fables
Edie Meidav
Poems of Place
G. C. Waldrep
Four Poems
JoAnna Novak
Chicago Accent
Sandra Cisneros
The Portal
Joyce Carol Oates
Spring 2025
William Burroughs hypothesized that language is a virus from outer space. Agree or disagree, language does inhabit us just as we inhabit it. Language represents—and is—imagination in action. It dances in an everyday state of evolution and is the shared invention of us all, whether we love, loathe, or have never heard of each other. We treat words with great care or with abandon. We are reckless with language, sloppy, incoherent, liars. But words are truths in themselves, precious, each one special, incandescent. No matter whether we realize what daily miracles they are, they will always survive us, gifts we pass down the generations. We Love All We Voices celebrates the languages of poetry, fiction, essays, in all their glory, with works by some of our most pioneering writers.
Conjunctions has always been language-centric. In that spirit we are also featuring a special portfolio edited by Trinidadian-American novelist Robert Antoni, in which vernacular writing is explored as an agent of its own authenticity—open, malleable, subversive, aggressively multi, overtly political, plenty rude, and alive. Nowhere have English-based vernaculars proliferated so vociferously as in the Western Hemisphere’s first melting pot, the Caribbean. Writings from this far-flung diaspora, as much or more than any other, make melody central to their meaning. Glossaries and footnotes are out; this cognitive and acoustic work must be accomplished in context. Perhaps most challenging of all, until fairly recently, there were few models to follow. Now they accrue with a vengeance: here, for instance.
Contributors to this language-celebrating issue, We Love All We Voices, include Arthur Sze, Aimee Bender, Edie Meidav, Alyssa Pelish, Rick Moody, among others, along with some of the Caribbean’s finest vernacular practitioners such as Marlon James, Tiphanie Yanique, and Marcia Douglas.
Conjunctions
New York, NY
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