“After the pandemic’s saturation of the vernacular lexicon—virus, plague, quarantine—language felt fatigued, emptied of resonance. By writing around the forbidden words, I wanted to recover creative intimacy with expression itself.”
Your Impossible Voice #32 is fanning the flames of righteousness as we teeter toward a smoke-crazed horizon. We are tracing the minutia of generations through room-sized replicas and reenactments. We are drying laundry on a patchwork of metal sheets. We are back on campus, on the prowl, clawing at mattresses, chasing ghosts and radiance, plagued by absentia. Above all, we are secure in our knowledge that every fact reigns absolute, even its opposite.
Featuring new work from Vincenzo della Malva, Molara Wood, Khalil AbuSharekh, Ian MacClayn, Karen An-hwei Lee, Austin Adams, Eric T. Racher, Mary Burger, Jerry Thompson, Shawna Yang Ryan, Steve Barbaro, Kirsten Kaschock, Mark J. Mitchell, Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad, DS Maolalai, and Cliff Tisdell.
By Karen An-hwei Lee
“As far as I can recall, my first dream in the plague of absentia was not about soup dumplings but simply about wastefulness. In a long waiting room, men and women in lab coats stood before a porcelain gullet, smooth as a swan’s throat.”
Issue 20 features work by Luisa Valenzuela (translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz), Alvin Lu, J. Weintraub, Jessica Love, Keith Carver, Karen An-hwei Lee, Christopher Clubb, Mike Dressel, Jorge Enrique Botero (translated by David Feller Pegg), Talal Alyan, Carl-Christian Elze (translated by Caroline Wilcox Reul), Bijan Najdi (translated by Parisa Saranj), and Amy Forstadt. Cover art by Jerry Seguin.
By Alvin Lu
“Not a poet-novelist,” a fictional Franz Kafka calls himself in Sonata in K. This hard-to-classify work about the misadventures of Kafka and a 38-year-old polyglot Japanese American interpreter named K in Los Angeles, Amerika’s weirdest city, is also poet Karen An-hwei Lee’s first novel.
Karen An-hwei Lee (“Letter from Orange Country,” Issue 4) has a new chapbook, What the Sea Earns for a Living forthcoming from Quaci Press in December 2014. She has also produced a new poetry-video, which makes its debut here. FIRE ON ANGEL ISLAND for the...
By Karen An-hwei Lee
Several years ago, a friend gave me a gift subscription to a magazine that sent, in turn, a sequence of maps—a bird migration map, a global warming map, a seas-of-the-world map, a night-sky atlas, and a map of the globe at night.
By Karen An-hwei Lee
Who is Albertine? For a clandestine majority averse to reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, a young woman named Albertine may be lost, indeed. On the Carsonian continuum, however, The Albertine Workout considers this question in a lively style: who is she? Carson’s survey of Proust’s novel takes the shape of a marvelous serial poem—with nary a dull mention of the narrator’s ruminations over a cup of tea and madeleines—illuminating the finer details of Albertine’s character.
With the summer heat just around the corner, Your Impossible Voice #4 is here to refresh and delight! Our latest issue brings new work from Fulbright Foundation fellow R. Zamora Linmark, National Endowment for the Arts fellow Geraldine Connolly, Norma Farber First Book Award winner Karen An-hwei Lee, Donald Hall Prize winner Kirsten Kaschock, David Bajo, Chris Yamashita, Racquel Goodison, Michael du Plessis, Sven Hansen-Löve, John Beckman, Christopher Kondrich, Sammy Greenspan, Peter Burzynski, Bryce Emley, Monica Macansantos, Sierra-Nicole Qualles. Cover art by Jason Trbovich.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora:...
By Karen An-hwei Lee
An avid fan of Karen Tei Yamashita’s fiction—Brazil-Maru, Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, and I Hotel—I was thrilled to pick up Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance, the long-awaited anthology of electrifying performance worksedited by Stephen Hong Sohn in collaboration with Yamashita herself. Readers of Yamashita’s award-winning novels will be delighted to see her irreverent cultural motifs come alive through playscripts and archival photographs of the past three decades.
Karen An-hwei Lee (review of Notes on the Mosquito) has a new book of criticism, Anglophone Literatures in theAsian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations. More, including a review, at its publisher, Cambria Press. She will also be moderating...
By Karen An-hwei Lee
If I could sing well enough — or play acoustic guitar, for that matter — I would sing Xi Chuan’s early lyric poems in a quiet studio with a swept parquet floor.