When artists feel powerless, like their creativity and poetry is not enough (for themselves or for any real change), it is not the fault of the artist; it is by the design of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde tells us, “For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.” Therefore, in order to decolonize our relationship with writing and publishing, to re-empower ourselves by shifting our focus, and take everyone we can along for the ride, we must look in a different direction than perpetuating the status quo. We can feed multiple birds with one scone by learning a new craft and feeling the joy of bringing people together by giving something back. And so I did.

The Unworthy is undoubtedly horror—tension and fear permeate every page, along with death and cruelty and cockroaches—but by setting the story in a combined tech-climate disaster, Bazterrica pulls a strong current of science fiction in as well, playing on the globe’s most pressing anxieties, and the two genres only heighten each other. Horror is the art of emotional manipulation. Science fiction is, as Ray Bradbury coined it, the art of the possible.

Reading this psychological novel feels a lot like holding your breath. In it, there is an ever-present sense of evil and violence; a presence that would be minimized if the violent climax was actually depicted. In her withholding, Slimani expertly disconnects the known and the suggested, allowing her abundant foreshadowing to fill in the space that she leaves. 

Silence, like its close friend death, is unavoidable, and it comes and goes as it pleases. It quietly haunts the borders of meaning, lurking in the subtle folds of symbolism, waiting for the words to fade, allowing itself to sink back into the comforting realm of perplexity and incomprehension in pages that feel “crowded” with blank space. Silence in these poems reveals more than it conceals, and in its death-like quality, it envisages the catastrophe of the linguistic trauma of bodies that migrate to survive amidst war and seek a utopia, always on the verge of oblivion.

Cherokee is not spoken objectively, nor are semantic elements something of an isolating, demarcating machine. The language is concerned with the nature of phenomena, causal agents, and subsequent effects. Syntactic axioms are constantly moving, true for a moment, and forever shifting as time marches on. 

The Collection of poetry, to me, has always been a snippet of, or window into, identity; but in recent years this seems to have become a truly inescapable facet of the current condition and direction of the Collection.

In honor of the publication of Alex Baskin’s I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets, winner of Fork Apple Press’ The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest, we interviewed Alex for our readers of The Juice to learn more about his project, influences, and craft.

We envision The Juice as a place to feature the thoughts of writers and readers, both including and beyond the staff of Fork Apple Press. We see these posts as being more interactive than other publishing mediums, and to that end where we encourage our readership to write to us and each other in the comments, and continue the conversation begun in the blog post.