Issue 164

Summer & Fall 2023

  • EDITOR’S NOTE

    I’ve been thinking about nuclear semiotics recently.

    In college, I attended a heavily-promoted John D’Agata reading, in support of his newly released About a Mountain. D’Agata spoke about Yucca Mountain, a nuclear waste repository some eighty miles outside Las Vegas. Scientists and linguists were tasked with creating a warning sign that would last as long as the nuclear waste remains radioactive, 10,000 years in the future, when it is unlikely any contemporary languages will exist. I recall the solution was to create basalt pillars, etched with Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” face, arranged in such a way that when the wind blew, it would create a D minor chord, creating an air of melancholy. These sounds and symbols worked together to provoke trepidation at an instinctual level. As a young English major with an anxiety disorder, this image made an impression on me. While fact-checking this memory, I found I synthesized multiple solutions. I misremembered information from thirteen years ago, which is nowhere close to the 10,000 needed to communicate in this example. It has left me with a question: How do we leave something for the future?

    This is my last issue as managing editor of TriQuarterly. Not to mix metaphors, but I am ready to pass the torch to Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. I’ve tried to keep up the momentum set by my managing editor predecessors Aram Mrjoian and Carrie Muehle. I am proud to work with a team dedicated to publishing writing that converses with readers. We strived to create issues that recall the past, but speak to our future.

    The stories in Issue 164 are ethereal, haunting, and cautioning. A young couple searches for a symbol confirming their impending marriage in Ben Loory’s “The White Bird of the Forest,” while a dead woman possesses her ex-husband in “After I Become a Ghost” by Jessie Ren Marshall. Mary Hawley’s translations of Juan Carlos Mestre’s poems read like nuanced liturgies, while Ryley O'Byrne’s video essay titled “Liturgies” forces the viewer to kneel at the altar of technology. Poet Kathleen Radigan reminds us, “rat will outlast us” in the end.

    We feature a suite of prose poems in this issue by Richard Siken, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Vikram Masson, and Corey Zeller, pieces that shed form entirely. They are balanced by Sayuri Ayers’s essay on the movements of the lyric essay, harkening back to some of my favorite archival issues on craft and form like Issue 19: For Edward Dahlberg and Issue 38: In the wake of the Wake, all pushing for the acceleration of language.

    In my first editor’s letter I wrote, “We can never live up to this journal’s history, but rather, are contributing to this journal’s future.” This editorial team has done just that. Whether it’s long-term nuclear waste warning messages or an easily accessible archive, there is no guarantee our message will endure, but thanks to these writers and this staff, I am fortunate to be a part of this now.

    — Joshua Bohnsack
    Managing Editor, TriQuarterly


    MASTHEAD

    Managing Editor: Joshua Bohnsack
    Assistant Managing Editor: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
    Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
    Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
    Northwestern Assistant Director in Creative Writing: Colin Thomas Pope
    Social Media Editor: Emily Mirengoff
    Film Editor: Sarah Minor
    Fiction Editors: Patrick Bernhard, Jennifer Companik, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, Emily Mirengoff, Mariah Rigg
    Nonfiction Editor: Starr Davis
    Poetry Editor: Daniel Fliegel
    Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
    Technology Director: Ken Panko
    Technical Advisors: Rodolfo Vieira, Natalie Roman, Vince LaGrassa, Orzu Tursunova

    Staff: Ally Ang, Amanda Dee, Amanda Vitale, Ashton Carlile, Becky Payne, Christopher Lombardom Corey Miller, Dane Hamann, Ellen Hainen, Emma Fuchs, Erika Carey, George Abraham, Gillian Barth, Holly Stovall, Ivis Whitright, Jackson McGrath, Jameka Williams, Jeremy Wilson, Jonathan Jones, Katana Smith, Kathryn O'Day, Liz Howey, Lydia Abedeen, Marcella Mencotti, Marissa Higgins, May Dugas, Megan Sullivan, Michaela Ritz, Michele Popadich, Morgan Eklund, Nimra Chohan, Puck Orabel, Rebecca van Laer, Salwa Halloway, Surya Milner, Susan Lerner, Suzanne Scanlon

Image from The Seafarer

Essay Sayuri Matsuura Ayers Essay Sayuri Matsuura Ayers

Sing, Circle, Leap: Tracing the Movements of the American Lyric Essay

My journey into the expanse of the lyric essay began when I opened Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. At that time, I had been writing poetry for over ten years, exploring motherhood, mental health, and my Asian American heritage. I saw my work as lyric poetry that drew from the bloodlines of my first love, Sharon Olds, and her transformative poem, “Monarchs.”

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