‘The two chameleons in a glass case appeared to interest all of them, Heinrich thought, because of their beauty and their stillness. They looked like a pale painting.’
When Heinrich made his first visit to his father in the hospice and asked him if he wanted anything, his father merely requested some philosophy books. He was not sure, the old man whispered as he tried to sit up in bed, that he would be able to read them, but nonetheless, he would like to have them…
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Six writers and translators respond to Donald Trump’s travel bans. ‘It is always easy to invent enemies; it merely takes a failure of imagination.’
‘I think he saw the German spirit as one in which suffering or an appreciation of suffering was essential.’
‘How can I accept a trauma or a loss that I cannot define?’
Rebecca May Johnson on pregnancy and divining the future.
‘The past is no longer behind me but in front.’
An extract from About Ed by Robert Glück.
‘I won her with my grief first / a mess of steaming entrails, enticing / with its gloss.’
Two poems by Madeleine Stack.
‘You might think, who is this, and I might say, this is God, and what are you to do?’
