Review by H. V. Cramond
“The porousness and openness of Pai’s poems, their eternal present, reads not as an avoidance or a fuzzy, COVID decimated sense of time brought on by endless time online. Rather this opening is way of protection through integration.”
Virga, a derivation of the Latin word for “branch,” is the name for rain that dries before it touches the ground, appearing as a mass of streaks diffusing underneath a dark cloud. Shin Yu Pai’s newest collection, Virga, is a poetic reenactment of this meteorological occurrence.
Shin Yu Pai
“when my son’s cough / lingers, I feed him spoonfuls”
Shin Yu Pai
“it rested in a parking lot in North Seattle / the unhewn hunk of quarried stone touched”
Your Impossible Voice #25 opens with a story of love, loneliness, and DJs in Argentina, and closes with wayward Taco Bell bandits loose in the Buckeye state. In between, it delivers new short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction exploring anaphylactic reactions to dust, languages that sound like bonfire flames, dollar-store groceries, golden molars and nectars, witchy weather apps, migraines, matricide, and so much more.
Contributors include Cecilia Pavón and Jacob Steinberg, Robert Lopez, Shin Yu Pai, Brian Henry, Daryll Delgado, Linda Morales Caballero and Marko Miletich, PhD, Caroline Fernelius, Emilee Prado, Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall, Khalil AbuSharekh, Mercury-Marvin Sunderland, Gillian Parrish, Steve Bargdill, Diti Ronen and Joanna Chen, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Kevin McIlvoy, Adhimas Prasetyo and Liswindio Apendicaesar, and Tamiko Dooley. Cover art by Despy Boutris.