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.