Monthly Dispatch #21 — February 2025

A letter from the editor[s]

Discussing literature is a lot like sex in that it’s better when done in person and, outside of exceptional circumstances, in private. It’s easy to shit on social media, and we’ve been prone to offering critiques of it here, but it shouldn’t go without saying that none of this would be happening if not for connections made and maintained online.

It has, as loathe as we are to admit it, its value. However, coming off a week of tedious and unproductive discourse (if you don’t know to what this refers, peace be with you), and last night’s in-person “impromptu” event, the gulf between the abstracted, digital literoscape (our turn for the clunky portmanteau) and what happens when people get together in rooms, couldn’t be starker.

Access and availability are issues that cannot be simply swept aside — there is still power in global reach and the opportunities it offers. That said, if we had one wish for the readership of and contributors to minor lits, it would be that you get out there and press the flesh.

The Editor[s]

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The Barco, The American Pneumatic, The Chicago Pneumatic — Michael L Sevy

“on East Fourth Street near Phebe’s I took a class in 16mm filmmaking, down in a cluttered basement, disorganized, mismatched tables and chairs, smells of darkroom chemicals, machine oil and the summer sweat of my fellow pupils …”

Michael L Sevy has been published in 3:AM Magazine. In the 1980s he was the leader of punk bands Cold Dogs in the Courtyard and Bonus Marchers. Michael lives in Vermont. Twitter: @MichaelSevy Bluesky: @mlsevy.bsky.social

Catastrophising — Sarah Dawson

“You may think that the path in front of you where you’re firing the bullet is clear, but something may appear in the path of the bullet …”

Sarah Dawson is a poet who devises and carries out difficult linguistic processes. Her visual poetry book expecting a different result was published by Haverthorn’s Interruptions imprint. Recently, she has performed at the European Poetry Festival, Xing the Line and Ilkley Literature Festival, and her work has been published on the Pamenar Press website. Twitter: @sarahkdawson Bluesky: @sarahkdawson.bsky.social

The Reliquary Translations (37, 38, 40, 43) — James Rodker

Birds In Warped Time (certain sounds) and highs of 5 degrees
Pavane for a Dead Princess      (as pigeons ripple the Plaça de Catalunya)
(Receiving Stigmata   (with architecture))   in my thirst  they gave me vinegar

James Rodker is an experimental poet based in Bristol. He has work featured in the recent anthology Prototype 6, and has a chapbook forthcoming from Stone Corpse Press.

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The Square — Ty Holter

“Having mastered the once cryptic rhythms of the necessary daily tasks, and once seeing to the demands of my own upkeep, I take myself to the Square, not knowing what else there is to be done …”

Ty Holter is the author of the chapbook Extended Stay (Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, 2023). His work has appeared in Protean, Firmament, and elsewhere. A teacher and poet, he lives in Western Massachusetts. Twitter: @tylerleeholter Bluesky: @tyholter.bsky.social

Consistency — Joel Gordon

“Jefferson Hughes, Chief Produce Officer, cuts fruit better than any living person, a talent that few outside this business would even think to acknowledge. When he unclasps his cuffs and rolls his sleeves in the presence of the hundred and fifty managers who come to headquarters every year for his continuing education seminar, all chatter in that sloped cavernous space, closer to an operating theater than a classroom, ceases …”

Joel Gordon lives in Los Angeles.

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The Names of Love — Golan Haji (tr. Robin Moger)

“Like an infant learning by rote who answers “Me” when told “Say: ‘You’,” al-Junaid al-Baghdadi said that “there be no love between two people until one addresses the other as, ‘My I.’” …”

Golan Haji is a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He lives in Saint Denis, France. He has published five books of poems in Arabic: He Called Out Within The Darknesses (2004), Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), Autumn, Here, is Magical and Vast (2013), Scale of Injury (2016), The Word Rejected (2023). His translations include (among others) books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Alberto Manguel. He also published Until The War (2016), a book of prose based on interviews with Syrian women.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English. His most recent publications include a curated selection of poems by Wadih Saadeh, entitled A Horse at the Door (Tenement Press, 2024), Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023), a collection of the poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023), and Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022), with Yasmine Seale.

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In Memory of James Wright, Whose Poem I Ate — Tyler Cain Lacy

““In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems” takes up one page of what some readers argue consists of zero lines, lines nothing like the poem that James Wright wanted to show someone, anyone, before it disappeared into my foregut …”

Tyler Cain Lacy is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Reus (Press Board Press, 2014). His prose and poetry have appeared in Juked, alice blue, Bombay Gin, Columbia Poetry Review, Pinwheel, and Salt Hill, among others. He lives in the Bay Area.

Dr. Lysergus and the Holy Fool — Samuel M. Moss

“I have started working with Dr. Lysergus.

Was it today or yesterday?”

Samuel M. Moss is from Cascadia. Recent work has been published in 3:AM Magazine, New World Writing, The Fabulist and New Sinews, among other venues. He is an associate editor at 11:11 Press and runs ergot.press, a site for innovative horror. Twitter: @perfidiouscript Bluesky: @perfidiousscript.bsky.social

Roundabout —Will Mountain Cox

“We went to a lot of parties in January. And then again in November. Parties were, we guessed, what you’d call them. The parties always started and then grew, sadder, bigger, red-wine drunk, the drunk made sadder by the long strings of Christmas lights strung for ambiance in the badly decorated apartments …”

Will Mountain Cox is the author of the books Roundabout and With Paris in Mind. His writing has been published in Lithub, Forever Magazine, Hobart, Spectra Poets, The Drunken Canal and Vol.1 Brooklyn.

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اَلْغَوْل — Palvashay Sethi [25/02/2016]

“The accursed ghazal occupies a specific but significant place in Pakistan’s socio-cultural milieu. Specific, because its subject concerns women – particularly those of a certain ilk, and significant because despite excluding men from this aesthetic and speculative enterprise, it does little to prevent them from talking about it. And talk about it, they do. Talk of the accursed ghazal accumulates and is pervasive, like a room full of smoke. It seeps into houses, travels up buildings, circles schools, hovers near universities, floats around churches, and spirals mosques; free to travel where it likes …”

Palvashay Sethi is content to exist on most days. She’s completed an MSc in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh and lives in her home town Islamabad, where she is in the throes of a second adolescence. Twitter: @Palvashits

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Coming next month …

Non-fiction Colm O’Shea, Connor May and Eric T. Richter, stories from Tim MacGabhann, Avee Chaudhuri and Veronika Reichl, interviews with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng and William Boyle, and more …