Dear Reader,
Often, our encounters with place can be misconstrued simply as background or setting. This issue seeks to redefine place in multitudes. Place, in this issue, is a rich texture of landscapes. As you peruse this issue, you will find yourself in mosques, tea shops, rivers, wild fires, filipino supermarkets, classrooms, garden soil, homelands, both alive and dead. These writers examine places in their duplicity, their juxtapositions, their nerve endings. To investigate place is “to become a tourist in the familiar” (Shakeema, Smalls, “Summer Conjure”). Place appears in “unexceptional conversations about shrimp and rice and diabetes and home,” (Rob Macasia Colgate, “Seafood City”), in “copying out the sounds that originate in the body” (Chris Campanioni, “Barbarian”), in “not the word but its backlight cast” ( Kathryn Hargett-Hsu, “Hop Alley Heartland”). Like this, place becomes a language to interrogate, but also an idea to play inside, like “a thousand lawn sprinklers tipped and whirling” (Ellen Stone, “How I learned to love Kansas”).
Our stories of place are also stories of migration, haunted with memory. A refugee seeks to “ use her clairvoyant ability – the only thing she could take with her when she fled her homeland – to connect with America’s past and present. (Mimi Manyin, “Come To Mama”). A young Jewish immigrant arrives in New York and experiences the fragile grief of assimilation – “at every corner there was a kosher butcher, a synagogue, a library stocked with Yiddish literature. An abundance of preservation. To see their old world here, superimposed on something utterly foreign, was salt thumbed into the wound” (Judah Greenberg, “Mayn Kaddish”). A poet grieves the distance while in line for her COVID-19 vaccine, “It’s inconceivable to think an easy word— paper— kept me away from my parents’ entire family. After my shot, I am handed a small paper. In Kashmir, my uncle had a printing press” (Sara Afshar, “Uncle Anis Dies of COVID-19 at Ramzaan Hospital”). In these scenes, place is at times “incomprehensible,” both here and not here, a site of dislocation (Tanja Softić, “A Walk in Sarajevo With my Father”).
The disruption of place, or places, is another question in this issue. Place is a border in flux – between two mothers, continents apart, as the west coast dissolves into wild fires (Meghana Mysore, “Kerosene”) – between a Palestinian American cataloging her own life in witnessing the ongoing genocide in Gaza (Leila Barghouty, “This Place is a Lottery”) – between a poet and their “cheated childhood, bulldozed, forever gone”(Pari Sabti, “Ahvaz”). Place-making then can be a confrontation with the in-between. For an essayist, the natural world branches into the political questions -”While my wife and I listened with heavy hearts to the tree guy about why this tree had to go, my thoughts drifted to the complicated connections between Asian imports and US car makers, and how this particular land and its slow-moving plants has witnessed that story play itself out” (Petra Kuppers, “Tree Witnesses: True Crime Stories”). Similarly, another poet writes “I first have to talk about Palestine in order to talk about river banks (Tamar Ashdot, “in order to talk about nature”). These writers use place as a vehicle to move their work into surprising inquiries.
I want to thank Khaled Mattawa for the opportunity to guest edit this issue, and to Aaron Stone and Elinam Agbo for their unbelievable help in making this Mixtape possible. Thank you to the contributors for expanding my definitions for what writing about place can mean, especially the visual artists Adrian Acu and Tamar Ashdot for their beautiful photographs in the issue.
Reader, I offer this mixtape to you with great possibility, like a map pinned to the wall of your childhood bedroom. I cannot wait to see all the places where you will take it and go.
– A. Shaikh
A. Shaikh is a queer immigrant poet raised in Texas. You can find their poems in The Margins, Sundog Lit, EXPOST Mag, O’Lickety Split and elsewhere. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan Hell Zell Writers’ Program. Their internet thoughts reside @apricotpoet.