issue 31: monsoon 2025
editorial
We had put out an open call a few months ago for poems or prose on the idea of debt.
Here are some of the poets who responded, each coming at the idea in very diverse ways.
Luisa Futoransky counts small debts in which the large are refracted.
Christine Herzer intermedial piece offers a catalogue of debt and debt dreams, which haunts the voice that always either receives too much or too little. Herzer’s sequence invites us to consider debt as the unyielding precipice between the transactional and humane, between unconditional love and justice.
Emerging from the material heat of debt and overtime, Rebecca Kosick’s poems signal a living apparatus of work that renders us continually deferred, overdrafted, chartered to laws of production. For Kosick a new exchange, a shattering delay, is round the corner.
The poems of Jeannette Lozano Clariond have a reticent, aphoristic core. They are poems of brevity and tension, and they illuminate the indefinable. With his immense gifts as a poet and translator, Forrest Gander brings these elements into English, as if stepping carefully through a path with a candle in his hands.
Robin Moger’s Indebted moves through and beyond translation, tracing debt networks between Dhul Rumma (c. 696-735 A.D.), Golan Haji (b.1977), and their known and unknown readers. It is a work that incorporates speculation, rumour, annotation, and exegetical drift, commiting itself to the flux and quiver of the literary material at hand. This is translation as pattern.
There is a deep sense of the elegiac in these poems of Togara Muzanenhamo. With his signature mastery of the line, muscular in places and tender in others, he probes the history of oppressor and oppressed as it unfolds through two characters and in the other approaches that most human of elements, breath.
From poet Karthika Nair comes the very necessary picture of a forest of great ecological and tribal diversity. The Hasdeo forest in India was to be taken over for coal mining, though the proposal now remains suspended. And a billet-doux, an inventive, sharp letter-poem that changes shape with each page, indicative of Nair’s gift of working with countless poetical forms both older and contemporary.
Sarah Riggs's Tangier poems 'cannot get us out of imbalance—out of debt—[but] can generate energy for a species’ future’. In this future one's relationship to land, to people, to histories, moves forward with a velocity and care that burns away the perennial charge of debt.
In his two very different poems, Rodrigo Rojas Bollo mourns an iridiscent world in his native Chile that was never his; and he mourns a world, his own, that he can never seem to reach.
Jessica Sequeira speaks directly to our call on Debt. Her poem has the range and amplitude of her continent of South America. Connecting geography and history, she sings “a non-European music” to celebrate the many things to which she owes her gratitude.
This issue invited our contributors to reflect on a singular debt you hold, not just in the material sense, but within the exchange of voices, warmth, solidarity, shelter, inspiration, and immunity. What have they borrowed, and from whom, or what, have they taken? If the debt has left its mark, a weight pulling one toward the other, where does that mark live and in what form? Where does responsibility lie in this ongoing transaction? In this hectic space of giving and receiving, debt is how one implicates and binds oneself to the other, across latitudes, with or without promises of repayment. The ever-binding force of debt is what makes it such an event, a continuous provocation.