Comprised of three long poems, Teeter knows experimental forms can be as intimate as mothering; knows we can understand languages we do not speak. From “Hearing”s intensities of attention, to “Ambient Mom”’s familial Filipino immigrant soundscapes, to “Histories”s careful scrutiny of the socially-sanctioned narratives and trajectories to which we are meant to aspire, Teeter’s lessons in listening reverberate across career retrospectives and heritage languages, colonial histories and domestic intimacies, reattuning us to what we’ve neglected to notice in our efforts to create a life we can understand.
The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of “great works of literature,” but mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies and living off her parents’ generous allowance. Adding to her growing sense of inadequacy, her mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, has successfully leveraged his savant-level aptitude for languages into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret.
Adam begrudgingly tells her about The Centre, an elite, invite-only program that guarantees complete fluency in any language, in just ten days. This sounds, to Anisa, like a step toward the life she’s always wanted. Stripped of her belongings and all contact with the outside world, she enrolls and undergoes The Centre’s strange and rigorous processes. But as Anisa enmeshes herself further within the organization, seduced by all that it’s made possible, she soon realizes the hidden cost of its services.
By turns darkly comic and surreal, and with twists as page-turning as they are shocking, The Centre journeys through Karachi, London, and New Delhi, interrogating the sticky politics of language, translation, and appropriation along the way. Through Anisa’s addictive tale of striving and self-actualization, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi ultimately asks the reader: What is the real price we pay in our scramble to the center?
everyone’s left the hometown show by Liam Strong
Reflecting on the loss of musical and subcultural community, everyone’s left the hometown show acts as a time capsule to when punk and metal shows were once at their peak in the scene surrounding Traverse City, MI. The poems within retain shredded fabric from sweaty Gildan band shirts, memories of what feels like an era of time that never really existed. Perhaps an homage, maybe a love letter, probably just a postcard from the next town over.
everyone’s left the hometown show is a mixed media moshpit of poetry and photography, many photos of which were shot at Studio Anatomy in Traverse City prior to its closure in 2022. There is a conversational anger in the chapbook that grapples with the nature of suffering, such that the suffering we choose to endure can be pleasurable, that pleasure can even look like hardcore punks punching us in the face when we need it the most.
VAGABOND CITY 