Photographer Neha Hirve grew up in Pune, India, but that was only one of her many homes. Neha moves a lot. She has lived and studied in the USA, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and many other places. The relationship we have with the land we live on, and the people who are trying to redefine that […]
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for Ryan Home in timeto watch a drunksun stumbling. It flashes its pink ass & jetslike little crucifixescross the sky: I know such audacity, the needto burn & then beburnished, the urge to vanish: I’ve drivenoff the road with darkintent. It’s just my hands that spared me.It’s scary, being so closeto the mirror you […]
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her home-bleached hair, the strong smallness of her,the slippage of her soft walk in the rain,today this girl reminded me of you—the thrumming weight of how I wounded yousomehow inside the curve her shoulders made.I watched her blue shoes stir up limpid poolsof cloud-water, and my expired want for you mixed itself in, gasping and soaked.last […]
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I ain’t the good kind of Asian. I’m the onewho disappoints you. I see it in your eyes when we go out for sushi and I forget what nigiri is. I feel it across your tattoos I’ll kiss someday: koi fish samurai and fisherman’s wiveswide-eyed cats with claws outstretched characters faded indecipherable, strewn like wreckageacross your […]
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next thought—isolation is a beautiful syringe. next thought—when i went to Chicago that summer i took the train. Illinois is a whole lot of nothing. neutered landscapes in a lilting breeze. grain silos round as asses. Midwestern topographies are bargain-bin paintings everyone wants hung in their bathroom, which is to say something, probably. maybe i like to be […]
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Our lives are shaped by countless obstacles to our desires. Many of these potential obstacles – race, gender, class, and the culture in which we reside, for example – exist largely outside our control. Awareness of this truth rarely deters our striving, however. We continue to climb, to throw ourselves against these limitations. Where our […]
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Tanya Holtland’s debut poetry collection, Requisite, opens with a preface that softly urges the importance of spiritual ecology, which seizes my attention immediately. She advocates for the harmony and healing of nature, and caring for the earth as an extension of ourselves. She stages a lyrical political battleground of environmental crisis and the draining of […]
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Cut Woman, from small-press Game Over Books in Boston, is Dena Igusti’s debut collection. Their work is at its best in its play with space. Engaging with the trauma of female genital mutilation, the loss of her people, desire, and patriarchy, Igusti’s poems are varied in form but often united in their modes of fragmentation—apt, […]
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It’s been such a difficult year. As it comes to an end, the VCL team wanted to highlight some of the art, writing, and other things that brought us some joy and comfort this year. Clémence Chouteau, Art Editor 5 Things That Made 2020 Kind Of Okay 1. FUNNY WEATHER: ART IN AN EMERGENCY BY […]
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The VCL team is thrilled to announce our nominations for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes! Creative Nonfiction: – Girls and Other People by L Scully– Homegrown by Iris Yu Poetry: – Reverend K.F. Lord Reveals The Spectre Of Newby Church, 1963 by Cassandra de Alba– Unremembering by Kavi Kshiraj– Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104 by Esther Sun– nightmares […]
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Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholarship: “We annually recognize six emerging student or non-student poets as Gregory Djanikian Scholars. All emerging writers who have not published full-length collections are eligible (regardless of age, geographic location, or educational status), and are encouraged to submit. Writers with forthcoming debut full-length collections are eligible so long as collections won’t […]
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VAGABOND CITY 