The summer 1996 issue features stunning new work by poets and fiction writers of Chile, Columbia, and Peru—Marjorie Agosin, Pia Barros, Alejandra Basualto, Carlos German Belli, J.G. Cobo Borda, Juan Cameron, Luis Ernesto Carcamo, Jean Pablo del Rio, Oscar Hahn, Jotamario, Marco Martos, Giovanni Quessep, Laura Reisco, and Eduardo Vassallo. Guest-edited by American translator and poet James Hoggard, the feature presents some of the most distinguished and youngest writers of Chile and Columbia. Also included in the feature is an overview essay by Hoggard on the cosmopolitan sensibility and primitive vitality of the region’s literature.
The Pacific South American prose in this issue is equally inventive and energetic. All by women, the stories reflect the tendency among contemporary Latin American women writers to depict a world of instability, a consciousness wounded and troubled. Some of the stories, like some of the poems, explicitly address the physical and psychic violence of living in a totalitarian state.
In addition to the Pacific South American feature, the issue includes a collection of omoro,or desire-songs, handed down through the centuries by the female shamans of Okinawa. The collection was assembled and translated by Japan scholar Chris Drake.
Also in this issue are North American essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, and art. The prose and poetry of American authors include a personal essay on grizzly bears and marriage by Western nature writer Linda Hasselstrom; a sensitive fable about the culture of war by Barry Lopez; and a story by Monica Wood about the bonds of family love. Among the American poets is Arthur Sze.
The photography is by Gaye Chan, a Hawai‘i-based artist whose enigmatic, surrealistic pictures complement wonderfully the haunting fiction in this issue.
Summer 1996 (vol. 8, no. 1)
199 pages
“Here
I bring down the stone crag to crag
dragged unhearing above the noise
as sand its metaphor of time
This hard scar cirque & avalanche
slow fragmenting of the stratum rock
& dust made its mask of oblivion”
—from “Stone” by Juan Cameron
“Our meeting was a secret, though we met in a public place—the park square downtown, in the heart of the waterfront shopping district. He waited under the red sprawl of a sugar maple, head down, hands thrust deep into his pockets. I could have ducked behind a building and gone home with a free mind, with nothing further to hide from my husband and daughter, but I stood in the open until he saw me.”
—from “Unlawful Contact” by Monica Wood
“She came towards us. The men looked at their hands, their boots, anything that could take them away from that place. I couldn’t help but remember my childhood flowing from the rain in that wide greenness that is the South. My father’s long, think whip didn’t allow for visits to ‘those dirty people and their horrible life’—the attraction of that horrible life represented by the unfathomable Ermina next to her brazier, bearer of the future and of the evil eye.”
—from “Appraisals” by Pia Barros
“That night we could hardly sleep. We talked and talked till late. We talked about what we might find in Okinawa. We had received no information about what had happened back home since the end of the battle. We were happy to return, but we were also fearful about what we might find there. Where should we go upon landing? Where were our families? friends? houses? How would we eat? We had not a single answer.”
—from
“Sparrows of Angel Island”
by Mitsugu Sakihara
“Mushroom
hunting at the ski basin, I spot
a blood-red amanita pushing up under fir,
find a white-gilled man-on-horseback,
notice dirt breaking and carefully unearth
a cluster of gold chanterelles. I stop
and gaze at yellow light in a clearing.
As grief dissolves and the mind begins to clear,
an s twist begins to loosen the z-twisted fiber.”
—from “Before Completion” by Arthur Sze
Angle
of Repose 7
photograph by
Gaye Chan
| Gaye Chan recently had one-person shows at the University of Nevada at Reno and at the Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York. Her work is also part of the traveling exhibition “Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art,” showing at the Phoenix Art Museum this year. In addition to appearing in galleries in Hawai‘i and throughout the U.S. mainland, Chan has exhibited at the North Fort Gallery in Osaka, Japan. A recipient of a 1994 Rockefeller Foundation grant, she is chairperson of the department of art's photography program at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. |